DANIEL NESTER

ARRAIGNMENT OF A BEACH BOY

Mike Love has ruined America.  He has made ours a primitive boring land,

Censoring Brian Wilson, our country's only attempt at art song.

And now Mike Love rests comfortably in California, hawking Kokomo burgers

With his orangutan eyes, orange Republican beard, and fake west coast Alan Watts Buddhism. 

He has deprived us of songs beautiful enough to mark our conception,

Thus making us all less intelligent.  He has exiled our Mozart to a room with quarts of chicken fried rice.

Mike Love, who blundered Beach Boy harmonies all his life,

Who toured the world with comb-over hairdos and Andy Cap hats.

I condemn him for slurring this century’s only true melodist,

Now writhing at a piano with a stroke victim voice.

Mike Love, who sang exactly what he was told for five years, then rebelled,

Exiled his god to a quarter century of carbohydrates, mind control, air filters,

This is the traitor to the state, this is the war criminal who rhymed  vibrations with the excitations,

Ruining a symphony, who fucked up the theramin part in Germany,

Mike Love rests comfortably, like some dictator in his dotage. 

Who will accuse the happy goat on the cover of Pet Sounds

For not serving its country, biting the hands off the second guy from the right? 

These were the hands of a man who turned the knobs down in the studio,

Who asked a genius, What’s the bottom note?  What’s the bottom note?  What’s the bottom note?

And now Mike Love rides the gravy train to state fairs, Desert Storm rallies,

Endless Summer greatest hits packages, duets with The Fat Boys and John Stamos.

For ruining America, I summon the spirit of William Carlos Williams,

Who endured Eliot, the wasteland that set American poetry back 20 years. 

I summon Santayana, who exposed our fake gentility with queeny aplomb. 

I order every long-haired Englishman who jacks up the price of vinyl

To repent.  I call Mike Love to a tribunal, assembled to condemn his quashing sins,

All the songs that could have been written after Mike Love, all the babies born stupid after him,

All those fallen asleep to his misdeeds.

 —first appeared in Cream City Review

JAYCEE CARNIVAL PARABLE

Every summer some metalhead

Busted his noggin riding the ferris wheel,

Tangled in the instruments, probably

Trying to feel up his girlfriend.  You see,

In the 1980’s in southern New Jersey

It was difficult to camouflage ourselves,

What with all the bright clothing

And big hair that was in fashion.  And so

We were forced to romance each other

On amusement rides, only afterwards

To be ridiculed by the dunk clown,

Perched over water with a microphone,

Who told us to go home to our pitiful lives

And stop trying to be something we’re not.

The townspeople threw baseballs at him

And others slashed his tires, and we made out

With our sisters’ friends in the bushes

Until the designer jeans we sat on

Were covered with some ejaculate of concrete.

We emerged from the parking lots,

Still within humming distance

Of the Lightning Bolt, the biggest ride of them all. 

We stood and watched it

Somersault over our heads.
 

—first appeared in Flying Horse

POEM FOR THE DWAYNES

Dwayne Freedman was the semi-retard

who rode his bicycle backwards,

waving to the crowds laughing at him.

I know every town has one, someone

named Dwayne—or Duane—who stands

Bunyon-like over other boys,

who can’t be tracked down after

his fifteenth summer.  They don’t work

on the highway, picking up roadkill;

they don’t wash dishes or go to jail

selling coke.  The Dwaynes

just disappear.  For years

each Saturday morning I’d skid

my ten-speed on a fresh sheet of ice,

and open the Sunshine Carwash.

Prodigal Dwaynes from far-off towns

would walk up, premature mustaches

blonding their lips, all asking for a job. 

But my Dwayne, the backward bicyclist,

he never showed.  The easiest target

in dodgeball, an army-jacketed

manchild among green ties and saddle shoes,

Darwin would soon take him from

that edenic cement yard of flag poles. 

And, I know, this may be the worst way

to actually find Dwayne.  But he could see this

at a chain store (so many by the highways

these days), he may draw back with dorsal shock

from his days lighting farts in the pews,

the burnt methane competing with high mass

incense.  Dwayne might look back at my bio,

call me, and tell me what he’s accomplished

since that fifteenth summer, when I last saw him,

his cherubic face smiling, his ass

on the handlebars and boom box against

the sissy bar, playing Skynyrd and Sabbath

8-tracks, the potholed road to his back.

—first appeared in Slipstream

Daniel Nester grew up in Maple Shade, NJ.  His poems have appeared in journals such as Minnesota Review, Mudfish, Verse, Open City, and Fine Madness. He is a contributing editor of Painted Bride Quarterly and is editor in chief of the online journal La Petite Zine. Once in a while, he curates Karaoke + Poetry = Fun, a combination reading and performance series at The Lyceum, an old bath house in Brooklyn. He reads around the city, lives in Brooklyn with his lovely turntable and wife, and has been working "God Save My Queen," a prose poem memoir of his obsession and love for the rock band Queen.

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