the handshake deal in poetry

The only way anyone ever uses the Q-Tip
is the exact way the box tells you not to,
so as to defend a faceless corporation from lawsuits.
No one gingerly dabs around the edge of their ear
with Q-Tips or their generic cotton swab equivalents
no one wisps it gently by the lobe as one would carefully wipe the ass
of incontinent elderly Tinkerbell. No one does this.

No one in the history of the Q-Tip has ever done this.
A Q-Tip is universally a tool
for jamming as far as you can into your auditory canal
without actively popping your ear drum
then swizzles it around until the pain is too much
and draws the filthiest mess you can imagine out
beaming in pride at how clean you are now inside.
If you wanted to wipe the outside of your ear
you would just do that with a towel?

A Q-Tip is a medieval battering ram
which you use to wage a violent war inside your body
against disgusting ear wax. And yet.
The box tells you you’re supposed to use it
in a totally pointless way no one ever would
so that we can all wink at each other
and save rich people from a law suit.
This is the American condition in summation.

And of course we call mother’s little helper
“a personal massager” when on the shelves of Spencers Gifts.
And sure you could use it as an incredibly inefficient massager
that could only massage an area the size of your thumb’s tip.
Sure, you could do that. No one has ever done that.
Maybe as a joke they pretended to use it that way
maybe to try and fool a particularly naive person who found it
but no one has ever seriously used one as a personal massager. No one.

During Prohibition, former beer bottlers would sell pint bottles
of non-alcoholic wheat and barley drinks
with detailed instruction printed on the labels
that by no means you should definitely not
add yeast to them, recap them and leave them to sit for weeks
because doing that would make them alcoholic
because doing that would be illegal.
You could drink it unfermented. No one ever drank it unfermented.

Another great one you can see in any grocery store is
“this frozen pizza is not intended as a microwave food”. Oh Ellio’s.
Poor sweet innocent Ellio’s pizza-like carbohydrate slab company.
You don’t really believe that.
Frozen pizza that is just ketchup and imitation mozzerella
slathered on squished Wonder Bread and flash-frozen
no one is waiting an entire heating cycle of their oven for you.
In the time it takes an oven to heat, we could make actual pizza.
You are a food of desperation, economic desperation or
hunger desperation or time desperate or simply very high.
You certainly could cook an Ellio’s frozen pizza in the real oven.
No one has ever cooked an Ellio’s pizza in the real oven.
Maybe on a dare maybe an Ellio’s executive has done it at an trade show
as part of an extended ruse to pretend that it is actually food
but never seriously never not as part of a prank or fraud.
No one has ever done this.

But this is America and America is the land of agreed-upon fictions.
This is a land where we pretend everyone has a fair shake
so that people won’t feel guilty for their good luck
so that people won’t hold revolutions for their bad luck
we pretend that everyone’s getting an even shot at life
just so everything can be more or less stable.

This is the people will say
of African-Americans or gay Americans or Asian Americans
“Why can’t we just all be Americans?”
never reflecting on what a
jaw-droppingly enormous amount of privilege they must possess
to be able to say that.
It’s easy to say everyone’s just an American
when you were born into all the advantages of that designation
never even considering that, well
there’s a whole lot of people who don’t get those things.
Things worked out for you so, gosh, everyone must have had a chance.
It’s an agreed-upon fiction
so the privileged can feel like their identity had nothing to do with it
and so everyone else can’t complain about injustice.
This is America
this is the country that invented Hollywood on stolen Native land
this is what we do. This is America in summation.

We could do something about that
but it would be a really hard transition
and not terribly profitable so instead
we pretend to use Q-Tips to wipe dust motes off our cheeks
and that grandma just has a very specific muscle that hurts
that is pretty much just the size of a quarter.
We pretend that we’re going to take that
soggy cracker with Spaghettios on top and
cook it like a goddamned actual pizza pie
because as long as we’re pretending we’re doing good
we can feel like we’re doing something good
and that’s all that matters to us.
Do you hear what I’m saying?

Don’t you?
Maybe you need to ram a wad of cotton into your ear until you bleed.
Maybe you’ll hear me after that. Anyway. I’d like to pretend you would.