Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 10/4/2016 (2277 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.
National Poetry Month: Maurice Mierau reads Failed State, 2007
Failed State, 2007
to Britney
She holds one son and grips the wheel
below the helicopter’s racket. Sean
and Jayden wasted on her man as the cops
flutter above her rattling brain—
she checked out of Promises early.
From TMZ video you know all this.
Like an unregulated angel she sweats
the influence of her goddamn dad.
She puts the boy down and touches her head.
What she wants she wants now, Brit guns
it to the convenience store the kids
will sit and oh sh__ she has no money but
a British accent’s like a credit card, right?
Death and fat and puffy paparazzi
crowd her quick into the truck.
When she attacks Dano,
bald and umbrella-wielding she spits
on every sloppy-waisted fan
who wants her to die like an angel bleeding
in lockdown whose last hit
she can’t recall, driving, eating, wasted.
@2015 Maurice Mierau, reprinted by permission from Autobiographical Fictions, Palimpsest Press (Windsor, ON).
Maurice Mierau is the author of three books of poetry, most recently Autobiographical Fictions. His memoir Detachment won the 2016 Kobzar Literary Award. He lives in Winnipeg.
The Winnipeg Free Press will be running poems by Manitoba poets every weekday in April to celebrate National Poetry Month. The NPM in the WFP Project was edited by Ariel Gordon.
