Raymond Keen - One Poem

In The Caked Meat Of Our Circumstance

 

On graduation day

We vomit in our plates.

For years we had eaten our skin

So we could obtain membership

On the Skin-Eating Committee.

We had completed our studies

To determine if gravity is weakening.

A cannibal God,

Our studies had shown,

Is in a coma until December.

Using giant mirrors,

Gay theater critics

With poison egos

Had reviewed the War.

Standing on Frankenstein’s shoulders,

We developed a good vocabulary.

Hence, bald American women

Skinning the monkeys alive

In the hospital,

Or Dr. Teller

Playing the piano

Over the H-Bomb site,

Is the new paradigm.

If we’re right,

Then all of this means nothing.

 

 

 

Raymond Keen was educated at Case Western Reserve University and the University of Oklahoma.  He spent three years as a Navy clinical psychologist with a year in Vietnam.  Since that time he has worked as a school psychologist.  Love Poems for Cannibals was published in 2013.  His play, The Private and Public Life of King Able, will be published in 2015.