The Comeback Album

image (c) 2015 R William Lundy

THE COMEBACK ALBUM
from Pearl and Other Poems

I want to throw a party to snub all the people who didn’t invite me to their party.

At my party, I will have a pony, a piñata, and clowns.

There will be a bounce house and a special Taco Bell that makes free tacos for my guests.

Some of my guests will prefer McDonald’s to Taco Bell and feel disappointed, without saying so, that there is only a Taco Bell

but we will not need a McDonald’s because this Taco Bell will also make special Mexican cheeseburgers, for free.

The party will be deep in the South American jungle.

Live tigers will wander through this jungle, hungry. The tigers will have laser beams for eyes

and tiny Great White sharks will be riding the tigers on tiny saddles made of seashells

and all the guests will have to address the tiny sharks as “sheriff”

and if anyone forgets to address a tiny shark as “sheriff” he will be savagely beaten

and burned with laser beams, because the sharks will also have laser beam eyes.

Next to the jungle there will be a lush green valley tended by the Jolly Green Giant

who will sell my guests fresh canned vegetables for free

and periodically call out, “Green Giant,” in a tonal baritone that echoes through the jungle

startling my tame-wild tigers and causing them to lunge with half-crazed eyes in random directions

but my sharks will restrain my tigers with brutal tugs on their tiny reins

and the whole thing will lend to an atmosphere of pageantry and spectacle at my party

which my guests will come to appreciate, after their initial alarm they see that everything is quote unquote well in hand.

In a fantastic turn of vaguely, if unintentionally, racist imaginary South American politics

my tiny sharks and the Jolly Green Giant will secretly be at war over drugs, probably cocaine.

In a canny move against my sharks, the Jolly Green Giant will have secretly sold my guests stale canned vegetables for free

which my guests will realize simultaneously when they sit down to eat their vegetables at a climactic, communal dining event

and with a dream-like, phantasmagoric sense of horror interrupting what has been communicated, through several cinematographically brilliant cut-scenes, as my guests’ completely and unaffectedly trusting anticipation of vegetable freshness and goodness

the perception of vegetable staleness will dawn on them, at first incrementally and then abruptly

ruining my party.

I will be enraged at the Jolly Green Giant

with his internecine shark politics

and I will walk up to the Jolly Green Giant and punch him in the face

“What’s your problem anyways?” I’ll ask

but he is a giant he will crush and eat me

and go on a ballistic rampage

driving my tigers mad with rage

beyond the ability of my tiny sharks to control

and they will dart, helter skelter, mauling guests

and my party will be a catastrophe.

When the other people who were not invited to my party because I wanted to snub them hear about it the next day on the news

they will feel relieved they weren’t invited, and a secret glow of confirmation that yes, they were right not to invite me to their party in the first place.

But secretly the joke is on them

because I will have staged my death as a media stunt in anticipation of my comeback album

which will be a commercial and aesthetic success of staggering proportions

rocketing me, like proverbial phoenix, from the ashes of my untimely and publicly humiliating, if fake, demise

to new and dawn-like heights of stardom.

I will have a concert tour to promote my comeback album.

At my concert there will be a light show and fog machines wreathing the stage in thick white oceans of smoke, periodically pierced by radiant beams from the laser eyes of tiny sharks.

On stage there will be a giant mechanical tiger head

and my silhouette will emerge from the fog, rising above the stage on its giant mechanical tiger tongue.

Half my body will be covered in tiger fur

and half, in shark teeth

surgically grafted onto my skin in an experimental operation that will have brought me back from the imaginary brink of death

and symbolizing my meteoric return to fame.

My guitar will be made of human bones

and you will feel jealous

and regret not inviting me to your party.

(c) 2014 lee sharks

from Pearl and Other Poems:
http://www.amazon.com/Pearl-Other-Poems-Crimson-Hexagon/dp/0692313079/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1429895012&sr=8-1&keywords=lee+sharks+pearl