Two Short Essays on Nausea

the best songs are dyspeptic, you see,
or do not, should you be blinded
by afterthoughts of nausea the lyric
posits in your stomach's brain;
the best songs are the worst you feel
dripping into your weak bowel--
the best you can do with songing it
is, in feeding your throat soundthoughts,
fail to say what you mean and let
them chew on the uncooked notion that
the best songs survive the acids
and the squeeze and find themselves
embedded in the warm, brown folds
of wet, discarded nutriment.

***

Upon examining the constitution of my diarrhetic leavings in the toilet, before sending them on their way to flushland, I was able to make out a few kernels of corn and a roasted mushroom: my stomach flu must have made them pass through my system too quickly. That was when I remembered reading - maybe in high school - how the prisoners at Auschwitz, Dachau, and those other German horrors would be so starved at times they would pick through their own feces in order to find any undigested bits of food. I can't imagine what kind of happiness there is in finding a golden kernel of corn wrapped in a warm, brown turd. And happiness it is, or at least joy, a kind of joy we'd never entertain outside of a purely intellectual exercise; we might try to simulate such happiness but inevitably fail due to our unwillingness to admit that profound joy demands profound suffering. In this unwillingness we (pace our savage friends) are quintessentially American.