The Scars of Utopia -- Jeffrey McDaniel

(Poem #57)The Scars of Utopia If you keep taking stabs at utopia sooner or later there will be scars. Suppose there was a thermometer able to measure contentment. Would you slide it under your tongue and risk being told you were on par with a thirteenth century farmer who lost all his teeth in a game of hide and seek? Would you be tempted to abandon your portable conscience, the remote control that lets you choose who you are for every occasion? I wish we cared more about how we sounded than how we looked. Instead of primping before mirrors each morning, we’d huddle in echo chambers, practicing our scales. As a kid, I thought the local amputee was dying in pieces, that his left arm was leaning against a tree in heaven, waiting for the rest of him to arrive, as if God was dismantling him like a jigsaw puzzle, but now I understand we’re all missing something. I wish there were Band Aids for what you don’t know, whisky breath mints for sober people to fit in at wild parties. There ought to be a Smithsonian for misfits, where an insomniac’s clammy pillow hangs over a narcoleptic’s drool cup, the teeth of an anorexic displayed like a white picket fence designed to keep food from trespassing. I wish the White House was made out of mood ring rock, reflecting the health of the nation. And an atheist hour at every church, and needle exchange programs, and haystack exchange programs too, and emotional baggage thrift stores, a Mount Rushmore for assassins. I’m sick of strip malls and billboards. I dream of a road lit by people who set themselves on fire, no asphalt, no rest stops, just a bunch of dead grass with footprints so deep, like a track meet in wet cement. -- Jeffrey McDaniel