James Mirarchi- A Poem

censor

 

the censor taker is a hunchbacked automaton in clingy dress.

she looks human (despite being covered in synthetic peach fuzz).

like a parachute pack, her hunchback stores her metal origami wings.

she visits me in my home in the space trailer park for writers.

her purpose: to edit my edgy children’s stories.

meanwhile, other censor takers eerily fly about, tormenting authors.

think hitchcock’s “the birds.”

with her electronic fingernails (aka “dirt detectors”) the foxy censor taker

scans my stories for any obviously crass material.

when she catches some, she burns them away with her super phaser eraser.

one transgression, however, is perceived a felony:

turns out i made a freudian slip in regards to one of my lead character’s names:

“flavia” was misspelled as “labia.”

i am arrested and shackled piggyback to the censor taker

and flown to the vicinity of censorville

where i am greeted by a floating aerial sign stating: “symbolism is good.”

i am soon forced to endure a government cyber picnic

where the adults taunt me while dining on processed human steaks

made from children’s authors “gone astray”

and boast about their annoying brats, who jump up and down on astro turf,

blow battery farts into the sherbet sunset and feast like maggots on liquidy computerized cake.

i am then forced to join their assembly line of reborn “subversive” writers

who crank out hackneyed scripts for their holographic family films.

the only comic relief during these dark days is at noontime

when us writers spy upon mr. bossman and his mistress, in his office,

having epileptic sex on a flat metal sphere, their heads spinning like linda blair’s,

their joints dripping semen sparks, their mouth-holes squealing the words: “symbolism is good,”

while the docking sequence from “2001: a space odyssey”

plays above them on the imaxish ceiling dome.

they screech in ecstasy just as the rocket ship penetrates its space station.

yes, “symbolism is good,” especially for the sanctimonious

since it avoids confrontation with their true primal selves.

 

 

 

James Mirarchi grew up in Queens, New York. In addition to his poetry collections, Venison and Dervish, he has written and directed short films, which have played festivals. His poems have appeared in several independent literary journals. Links to his work can be found @: www.thehydratedpoet.blogspot.com/