Book Excerpts
Witness: 2017-2020
Poems
by Hilton Obenzinger
Houston, We Have a Problem
Hurricane Harvey
September 2, 2017
Houston, we have a problem
Houston, are you there?
Houston, do you have a problem?
If you have a problem, what the hell are we supposed to do?
Houston, you’re the one to guide us, and now you have sunk
Earth to Houston, are you there?
Come in, please
Earth to Houston—please stay alive
Houston, it’s 106 degrees in San Francisco, unheard of
Never been that hot, ever
Houston, the fires surround us, the smoke closes in
And you are swept away in a storm
Houston, you are sprawled across the Gulf
Like a patient etherized on a table
We laugh for you, but we know the ordeal continues
We laugh with floods and fires and earthquakes,
With gases and flows
Maybe Houston knows
Houston, will you guide us to another planet?
Houston, we have a problem
Warning
False alarm in Hawaii
January 13, 2018
Warning! A missile is coming your way
Stand outside with arms up to catch
The radiation and cure your headache
Oh say can you see
All the way up the sky’s inferno
Warning a war is happening right now
And has been happening for decades
No need for a missile, plenty dead already
False alarm
Return to your daily blinding flash
The Great Toilet Paper Panic
April 1, 2020
Suddenly toilet paper becomes a star
Crowds chase rolls down the street
Like teenage girls chasing the Beatles in 1965
Panic sweeps through the land, a different type of virus
Without toilet paper our rectums won’t be clean
And civilization will devolve into a stinky rash
We discover our bodies because of the plague
We may die alone, drowning in our own phlegm
But now we notice the obvious precious flesh
We all share bodies, we all inhale and swallow and shit
With Death silently circling around us
We reach deep into our sinews and bones
As if we discover them for the first timeAnd we exult in our commonality
Queen Elizabeth shits
Taylor Swift takes a shit
Jeff Bezos squeezes out his turds
The homeless man on the street corner takes a shit
You notice it because he shits out in public
But you know there’s a world of sphincters
Hard at work behind closed doors
Hand them all a roll of toilet paper
Wiping ourselves clean is a moral imperative
And we share the great fear that there’s none left
We will be abandoned, left to rot on our own
Making scatological jokes come true
So we grab all we can carry from the stores
We are afraid that our bodies will be taken away
We thought we were as solid as robots
But we are just soft bags of excrement
Trying to remember who we are
Trying to get a little comfort
Trying to hold a small sad piece of dignity
With a thin square of paper