Ode to the Desert Warthog

Vaporwave music mixes on YouTube number in tens of thousands.               I am listening to one titled “you wake up, it’s summer 2006 and life is good again.”             You are cocoa brown and look ochre in sunshine.                    You inhabit Horn of Africa in sex-separated groups called sounders. You can run 35 miles per hour. Other vaporwave video search results: “you went back to the past but no one was there”              “when you wake up before everyone else”                   “these liminal spaces found you”       “you fell asleep in the car on a rainy afternoon”           “the path forms as it’s walked.”           You possess special warning grunts not unlike high     speed Ninja Ultima Blender. Striped hyena think you are annoying because you attract Tsetse flies.             Tsetse like bushpig too but striped hyena does not denigrate bushpig as meanly.         Imagine being blamed for what is attracted to you.           What respect aspect ought we expect as inspected suspects? Good luck with that question. The town bus driver tells my seat row she sells a healing balm out of her own face’s dead skin cells. Other passengers yell speak up. I hear her fine. She does not repeat herself.

Ode to the Oriental Roller

Sad police chief            asked if I ever tried praying happy                   then he showed me you. Combine chicken         dalmatian         Robert Mapplethorpe:             comes close to creating you pigeon. Feathers rest below tail            so profile appears like two tails: one tail true, tale as old as crime, other tale romantasy, as old as 2008.                 You do not fly really, as in go anywhere. Instead, you remain spazzing out in general vicinity                 flipping yourself upside down repeatedly in pictorial sequences. Like banned tarot deck         whose flashcards reveal impossible language           changing characters every century.                   Difficult to describe without seeing for myself.       I asked ten poets to attempt.    All inept.          Fact: at least five haiku writers have been imprisoned since late 1800’s.       Arsonist Kosei Homi taped “Setting on fire / Smoke gives delight / To a country fellow” to home window for sad police chief. Stripped of fortune cookie, sad police chief locked fortune and cookie into Nephrite jade safe.     I asked: “is that the stone of heaven?” Sad police chief said no more questions. I was not even a reporter. Concerned citizen.

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Jeffrey Hecker is author of Rumble Seat (San Francisco Bay Press, 2011) & chapbooks Hornbook (Horse Less Press, 2012), Instructions for the Orgy (Sunnyoutside Press, 2013) & Ark Aft (The Magnificent Field, 2020). Recent work appears in South Dakota Review and Bennington Review. A fourth-generation Kepanī via Hawaii, he teaches at The Muse Writers Center & reads for Quarterly West. @heckheck03.bsky.social