Mark Blickley is author of the story collection Sacred Misfits (Red Hen Press) and his most recent play,The Milkman's Sister, was produced last Fall at NYC's 13th Street Repertory Theater Blickley is a proud member of the Dramatists Guild and PEN American Center. He recently published the text based art book, 'Weathered Reports: Trump Surrogate Quotes From the Underground.' (Moria Books, Chicago)
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After looking at the 1916 Hemingway poem he wrote at the very beginning of his life as he pondered futurism, I decided to bookend this minimal text with something he would have written at the very end of his life when mental illness turned his existence into a wheel of fame he could no longer spin, an inertia in motion that transformed his spirit into a desperate animal searching for escape. His youthful opened ended futurism soured into a lethal future where he could no longer write. In my poem, he has filled in the blanks of his life and his punctuated poem with shotgun shells and the rhyming verse of a farewell lyric of himself as an animal destroyer and paranoid macho taunted by broken fantasies of pursuit and entrapment that he finally ends with a 12 gauge shotgun.
RAGE in a CAGE leads to a TWELVE GAUGE
You sit on your fat ass and watch me sweat
While I spin on this wheel, trying to forget
I’m just a shit stained rodent, your captured pet
Ready to bite your balls off cause I’m a manly threat
I got rage in the cage cause I’m no dancing fool
I got rage in the cage so shove your ridicule
I got rage in the cage going round this circle jerk
I got rage in the cage for a white man who don’t work