Channeling the zeitgeist of mid '80s puffed-hair poof, Bean Newton in "Artisans Go Belly Up at 12 O'Clock" uses the irony of a lowbrow speaker revealing his own angst to lament the death of highbrow culture. It's both act of post-modernism and screed against it, both jeremiad and laundry list.
Found, interestingly enough, under a pile of Newton's literal dirty laundry shortly after his death, the poem has never been legible until now, when a grant from the Downy Teddy Bears for Learning Foundation allowed for the scrap of paper to be CAT-scanned.
Special thanks to Purewater University's Advanced Medical Claims Training Program for their access to the required technology. -- E.W. Wilder
Artisans Go Belly Up at 12 O'clock
Was it so wrong to wish Rhonda dead?
Was it so evil in the adolescent sum time
to wander off without a socket
to my name and in only a Starsky
& Hutch t-shirt and a bad case of acne and a switch-
blade that's really a comb? I was tough
in my black leather blazer and my zipped-up shoes.
Was it really so outré to spy on the feather-
haired Farrah Foxette across the alley as she slunk
home after a drunken farthouse hooten-orgy? So vul-
nerable, she looked, there on the deck, bra=less and small-
boobed, nipples perked out to the cold? I could have then,
but I didn't.
Who regrets the nerve
of children to recount their fathers stoned on Cutty
Sark and 8-tracks of Gordon Lightfoot on the chrome
Nakamichi and the old KLH speakers, one with a woofer
blown? The matters of fact we survived. Was it so false
of us to lust after Camaros and KISS posters and to wish
raunchy Rhonda dead?