Poem for November

One wonders if life
is nothing more than
a pantomime of
all the bullshit we've read,
all the fairy tales
and happy endings,
that song playing
on the radio.

My television wants
to suck my soul dry
and steal all my ideas,
but the eternal hard-on
will not go down.

This culture is killing me
and everyone else
with its cigarettes
and its savage approximation
of the truth.

I have to watch
five talking heads,
read three different newspapers
and fuck myself twice
before I even know
what's going on.

We live in a world
only mothers could
lie about
and tell us
everything is going
to be all right,
but we know,
we know: the poets lie also.