Our hero, Trevor Whiz, has infiltrated McDonalds’ corporate management. He writes from somewhere in the West:

12/28 3:21 p.m. — On New Year’s Eve we will thicken our shakes, just as we have on News Years’ past, thus gradually deceiving parents into feeding their kids ice cream with their hamburgers. Hah, but it’s not ice cream after all; creamless and milkless, our shake is its own food, a new food. They believe it’s a “shake” just because you eat it with a straw. Little do they realize that we’ve made the straw one millimeter wider in circumference every year. Soon we will introduce a truly wide sucktube, with a mouthpiece.

Proceeding with planned replacement of Ronald. Old Ronald, tired and bitter, has been left in a place where he can’t make much noise. We are running our first spots with the new Ronald. Tends to overact. Also, a bit effeminate. Auditions continue.

4:29 p.m. — Here’s the hootch on the old Ronald: He was a bleeding heart, he supported policies like the Ronald McDonald House. But he got guff from the public due to increasing hamburger prices. Meanwhile the boys upstairs were raking in big bucks and letting Ronald take the blame. The old man began squealing, talking whack. We sent him to a nice small town in New Mexico, with a little schoolhouse for the kids, a church, beauty parlor for the wife and not much else. He just keeps quiet and nobody gets hurt.

We are at the testing stage with the new sucktube. Mouthpiece not yet refined to the point at which S’s can consume a thickshake without having it spew out their noses.

by Ogden the Hermit

And so it came to pass. And so it came to pass.

My name is Ogden; I come from the future. I have seen what is to come. I have seen the outcome of the 75th Super Bowl and the assassination of Gary Coleman.

I have seen the end of the world.

I know my own future: I will try to stop the end of the world. I will climb into a time machine built by the last known survivors of the Reign of Terror and I will travel back to the past to warn the people of Earth of what awaits them, to stop the destruction.

I will fail.

And then, years later, I will climb into the time ship again and travel back to the past again to warn the people of Earth of what waits them again, to stop the destruction again.

It’s always the same. You see, I am caught in a time circle; I have seen my past, my present, and my future many times. They are always the same. I have come back to warn you. I will fail.

I will die two years, six months and four days before my father will be born. Twenty-two years later, I will be born, and the whole mess will start all over again.

I will warn you now. You will think that I am mad. Everyone thinks that I am mad.

Anyway, here is my story:

And so it came to pass that the Reign of Terror began. No one saw it coming. No one felt it take hold. The best thing about the Terror is that it was, that is to say, it will be, painless. The saddest thing is that we can stop the Terror, but we will not.

What is the Terror?

Well, it’s advertising. That’s right—print, radio, and especially television commercials are actually an evil plot orchestrated by these great, scaly, one-eyed things from outer space … I know what you’re thinking, but it’s true. It all started back in 1978, when a bunch of guys from a company that I can’t name were abducted by these creatures. Upon returning to earth in early 1987, these traitors began, that is to say, they will begin, to take over the advertising industry. They became presidents, chairpersons, and even copy writers … that is to say that they will soon. These villains infected their coworkers as well … at least, they will infect them.

No, seriously.

Before long, the great, scaly, one-eyed things from outer space were ready to put their fiendish plan into action. The plan, as it so often is, was to take over the world. The process: brainwashing and hypnosis through subliminal messages in our own advertising industry.

Oh, it started off innocently enough—a few dumb situations, some bad dialogue, and an inane song or two; a few people absent-mindedly humming the Fruit Roll-Ups jingle for hours on end. But with typical science-fiction like expediency, it quickly snowballed into a dilemma in which the entire civilized world hung in the balance.

Yes, before long every human being on the planet had had his brain short-circuited by subliminal commercials. All across the globe people stood like drones, responding only to the orders that were barked at them from TV sets by head agents of the great, scaly, one-eyed things from outer space.

I never did catch their names.

A small band of us, all former professors at Temple University—who fired us when we spearheaded the school’s 56th teachers’ strike—managed to escape to a secluded area in the backwoods of Pennsylvania. For six years we labored diligently on a time machine that would allow one of us to escape back to the past to warn the people of Earth what awaited them, to stop the destruction.

I was just a Physical Education teacher. I wanted nothing to do with the whole mess … Unfortunately, I was also the last one left alive.

So, here I am, again. This is my warning, for good or ill. And so it came to pass. And so it will come to pass.

My name is Ogden; I come from the future.

Warning:
Ogden the Hermit is a dangerous lunatic. Formerly a Physical Education major at Temple University, he is currently at large, as he is wanted by the police on three counts each of embezzling and indecent exposure. If you have any information as to his whereabouts, please contact your nearest law enforcement agency.

When I made the move for my coat at 3 a.m., having spent the previous hour filling up on coffee with lone survivor Mrs. Dumpy, I wondered what had happened to Colleen. As I bent over to retrieve my coat, knocked off its hanger to the floor of the hall closet in the murky Precambrian dawn of the evening, I was answered around the waists from behind by an ambush of arms. I about-faced to find Colleen beaming back a wide Harpo Marxist grin. I felt a violent erection beginning. I managed a self-effacing “It’s very late.” She said nothing, but her thigh, saluting my penis, retorted “Love me!”

I peered over my shoulder through the half-open door of the sitting room. My view, partially obscured by a hunk of door, exposed a nightshirted Amy-Katherine pulling the panties off of a recumbent Doreen on the sofa. I squirmed in order to crane my neck for a better look-see. Colleen, misinterpreting this as an escape gesture, tightened like a boa constrictor.

I retaliated by squeezing her breasts.

It occurred to me that I was Charmin’s fussy, bespectacled Mr. Whipple, moral arbitrator of a grocery world, whipping around the bottomless bowels of post-midnight UHF-TV, whining, constantly whining, “Ladies, PLEASE.”

We stared at each other. Maybe a minute passed. Though we had not as yet kissed, we were poised.

Suddenly, like a car-horned Godzilla blowing seltzer water out its top: a suspicion someone was watching. Paranoia?

No. Mrs. Dumpy. She stood, the odd person out, in the kitchen threshold. We had been transported, pullets on a conveyor belt, down the skull-paneled, wriggling eyeball-carpeted hallway by some unseen, diabolical Frank Perdue of a God. The walls vibrated. From behind, a strangling noose of arms coiled around my throat.

I chickened.

Extricating myself from the mangled wreckage of hands, arms and thighs, steam hissing, I lunged for the door and staggered out. No. I was in the kitchen. I tried to double back but instead bumped into the refrigerator, which I embracingly kissed heartily. The buzz from the automatic deicer, the beast’s metallic heart, made love to me, singing:

Everything’s smiles,
Cheer’s the style;
Don’t look glummmmmmmmm,
or you’ll be the bummmmmmmmmm.

But the hint of irony unmanned me. I slid to the floor, balled into a fetus and wept.

I awoke shortly after seven. Not only did silence greet me, it roared. A surgical thermonuclear first strike? I looked around. Sunlight seeped in through the mangled Venetian blinds to form blobs of light on the kitchen floor. Peeping through the open crack of the sitting room door, I saw what I braced myself to see, debris and dead bodies. Blood, or what I feared was blood, perhaps melted skin, it was yellow, covered y flannel plaid shirt.

A look in the mirror, however, xed Armageddon. Eggs! Smeared into my hair. Oozing out the scalp. Yolk streaking my face like streamers of snot. Someone, something, has a devious mind, I thought. I picked the eggshells out of my hair and off my shirt only to discover a mother lode down the backs of my pantlegs.

I grabbed my coat from off the hallway floor, curiously littered with a wardrobe’s store of panties, bras and stockings, and limped the two blocks to my car. On the way home the whistle-tweeting policewoman on the Marlboro billboard, insinuating My Throat is Sore, winked knowingly.

The poet awoke before dawn, but he didn’t but his boots on. Instead, he wore dark glasses. “To see the stars better,” he said, but we saw him on the beach with them, staring into tits. His appearance was scrawny, skinny. This, of course, was from the sheer enjoyment of constant word-sparkling vision upon him that he simply forgot to be hungry. Yet we saw him on the jogging path on the way to the pay gym with the other yuppies.

So, when he says how he’s struggled all these years and, in a letter to a girl who actually likes him (she lives 3,000 miles away), writes that, since it didn’t get him anywhere, it’s time to put a more practical application upon his great god-sent gift for words. Yes, you’ve guessed it, he’s into advertising.

He practices on her. You hair is very, uh, dark, my love. But not so dark as Snappy’s Typewriter Ribbon. Wow, what a success! Even though it returns to that anachronistic form of the sentence, it does things that no poet has really done yet: incorporates advertising into poetry. What a bold discovery! At last, it can now reach the readers of Philadelphia magazine, and with comic relief, it’ll be such a well-rounded nourishment. And, economically, a miracle!

Surely, this is the dawning of the new age.

Surely, she’ll leave him for a Marxist.

– Chris Stroffolino