Small Potatoes

I don't normally use this blog as an outlet for my poetry, but today the opportunity availed itself to me.  I am working on my second full-length collection of poetry, called 50%, and I just finished (I think) a poem called Small Potatoes, a poem that is far less evasive and much more emotionally direct that the majority of the poems in the collection.  It is also a poem that makes potato chips the occasion for its outburst of feeling about the world we live in.  Here are some chips I made at home last year:

Small Potatoes

People are always asking me, Jono,

what about politics? 

By this they mean that

in their personal vision of my future

they see me giving stump speeches

about how far one potato must travel

before it becomes a potato chip,

about how many hands one spud must pass through

before it becomes a crinkle chip

en route to a mouth somewhere.

I won’t bore you with the details

but if you have ever made potato chips in your own home,

you will understand how phenomenal it is

that chips everywhere are so cheap. 

You could never beat this price in your own home. 

You’d lose on the price of the potatoes alone. 

There is so much implied in one bag of chips,

sometimes it makes me want to die. 

So I run my mouth about potato chips.

If you do not do everything alone

it seems you can never better the junk that is

abundantly and cheaply available everywhere.

We are surrounded by it.

It  costs five times as much to get one good chip

that has not been involved in the trap of existence

that other people along the line feel as strongly as I do.  

This is a nightmare to me who is poor.

I don’t want to be complicit in suffering

just because I want a fucking potato chip.  

But this, I am afriad, is how the world really is.

I just literally threw up on the floor.