Dandelion wine and handmade soaps
are worthwhile. They’re a matter of life
and death. We need them now more than ever.
We’ve got to keep the madness at bay. We need
skills to stay out of Bedlam.
City life is sexy, and is not to be missed, but if you
like Johnny Cash, you need to plant your own corn.
You’ll need to raise rabbits. We must go back to polishing
our own boots. Hand out the saddle soap, get out the rags.
Let’s get our hands dirty again; let’s work up a sweat.
We must take it back before the Beatles. The Fabulous Four
are part of the problem, along with dark memories of JFK
and a morbid interest in his assassination. Forget about it.
Let’s go all the way back to FDR and the fighting spirit.
We should watch reruns of Gunsmoke.
It’s not that boys can’t be girls. It’s not that girls
can’t have dicks. Let the kids play house as long as they learn
to make strawberry preserves and dill pickles. Someone
has to pick the cucumbers. Someone has to muck out the stalls.
It hardly matters who feeds the chickens. Pick up a shovel.
Candle-making is a worthy task, along with beekeeping.
This is good. Let’s go back to doing it all by hand.
Keep your car, keep your smart-phone, keep your
glow-in-the-dark dildo, too, but someone has to learn
how to butcher a hog. Someone needs to learn how to darn.
It’s not that cosmopolitanism is unpatriotic; no, not that.
It’s that it teaches people to prefer rice over potatoes.
It instructs people in the use of exotic practices like drug
addiction and sexual debauchery. Many are wasting away.
It’s okay to be cool, but it’s much more important to fend for oneself.
About the Author
David Lohrey is from Memphis and now lives in Tokyo. He graduated
from UC Berkeley. Internationally, his poetry can be found in Otoliths,
Stony Thursday Anthology, Sentinel Literary Quarterly, and Buckshot
Magazine. In the US, recent poems have appeared in PoetryCircle,
FRiGG, Obsidian, and Apogee Journal. His fiction can be read in Crack
the Spine, Dodging the Rain, Literally Stories, and The Broke Bohemian.
David’s The Other Is Oneself, a study of 20th century literature, was
published in Germany last year, while his first collection of poetry,
Machiavelli’s Backyard, was released in August. He is a member of the
Sudden Denouement Collective.
Read this and more by David Lohrey in Issue 03 of the Lady Blue Literary Arts Journal.