My rendition of MKUltra recalls 
how popular music’s evolved to a
kind of mood control. It wears you
raw as a horse vivisected in sticky
fluorescents, those crackling ballasts
some far sweeter saint of abandoned
children than I might name and arrange in
the ersatz sky that a Wal-Mart superstore
shoulders as some kind of Minecraft astrology.
 
So when I hear what Nixon in China decries
as but loud pop blistering out of some preening
machine, its candle-glass fly’s eyes spluttering,
smudging the seamless nexus of breath, of song,
of inchoate poetry, into a fug of what tongues
numbed blue from attempting to do to a snow
cone all of those things some others just do upon feeling
prone; I feel quite stuffy and cold. I feel
 
those kids from the old Mickey Mouse club
scrubbing a cease and desist in my pall-wan
breastbone.
 
A cease and desist to what 
you might find yourself 
muttering, thinking,
she must be mad
 
about something other than
standards of popular music
slackening into but mass 
hypnosis. Maybe. However, 
 
a cease and desist to, how
could I say it more safely, to living, to
feeling most anything other than what
 
I might feel when scrubbing
my tongue through a coke-eaten 
Wendy’s cup, her head lolled 
back, her collar just less than 
awkwardly reading, MOM, and, 
of course, that unspeakably prickling 
fact that my own mother’s name was
always, since ’66, no more than,
perchance, a carbon copy of Wendy
 
—she’s even started dying her hair red.