Vertigo at the County Fair

I finally found a use for August. Who would have thought there was so much fun in fecundity. It was the rinse and spin cycle of life. There was an exhibit of pygmy goats next to the booth for the Republican Party and baby Republicans hugging their iron teddy bears and Buddha cows like five hundred pound valiums unattached to their blue ribbons and a small pen of sheep who were glassy eyed and dazed not knowing who to follow where. Over at the rodeo Marlboro men and women gone mad were taking the S curve at LeMans at one hundred and forty miles an hour on wild bulls and putting their horses into four wheel drifts around barrels. I left and went looking for real courage, a pharmaceutical salesman with a Prozac booth. Real courage is rare, it wasn’t there. But smack in the middle, too good to be true, life everlasting- the vinyl siding display right next to the pro-life booth, the slip of the collective unconscious showing. This was better than a U.F.O. encounter group and a Baptist prayer meeting combined. There were horse shoers with beards and suspenders, mountain men who couldn’t keep the wolf from the door so just kept shoeing and moving on. Next to the rest room, inside a booth with a large sign that read, “Are you going to Heaven, two question test reveals the answer,” sat an old expressionless couple like a stoic Gospel gothic. I wanted to show my cards and raise them one, “This is heaven, where do we go from here” but I didn’t want to chance turning cement to loose gravel on such a nice day. Out at the edge of the fairground in two small spaces was a Democratic booth next to the ‘Alliance for the Mentally Ill’ who were handing our iris bulbs to plant. I took one to plant but didn’t because I couldn’t tell which end of the bulb was up and it would have deepened my depression to think of that poor iris growing down into the darkness away from the sun. I wanted to get this into a poem and I tried but I couldn’t do it. I realized the fair was just too big for a poem. There was a booth for everything but the blind making love, everything but that “god” fuck everyone was in search of, that we all came for, that was only fair.