Busta Poesy: Amanda Palmer's Unpublished Paeans to What's on TV

In a week that saw major global earthquakes, a bombing at a marathon, a city shut down, a series of deadly shootouts, the defeat of even a toothless piece of gun-control legislation, the Internet and the New York Post proudly labeling several innocent people as terrorists, hate crimes against Muslims, and a massive and deadly explosion in Texas—well, after a week like that, it takes some serious stones to make it about you. Amanda Palmer doesn't have a modesty problem.

You might have heard of Amanda Palmer. A punk rocker turned folk singer, she embraced the leveling social-justice agitation of both genres, married it to Kickstarter's DIY funding, asked for $100,000 from fans to make an album and wound up being given $1.2 million. Then she used most of the money on frivolous shit and paying off personal debts, while expecting local musicians to play on her tour for free, and fans to feel rewarded by the same "HERE IS A GIFT CERTIFICATE FOR ONE (1) HUG" lazy compensation she was doling out for a donation total smaller by a factor of 11.

Palmer clearly exhibited significant difficulty in picking up context clues from even her own personal history in music. Thankfully, her degree of obtuseness extends beyond shitkicker balladeering and fan plunder. After bearing witness to the horrors in Boston, Palmer published "A Poem for Dzhokhar," addressed to the alleged Boston bomber who was captured in a boat after a frightening daylong manhunt. Her poem—35 aired-out lines of lowercase e.e. crummy—does an excellent job of cataloging the ennui of privileged insipidity. Which is to say, it sings a song of Amanda Palmer to Amanda Palmer that, one supposes, Dzhokhar might eventually overhear by accident. It is glurge clickbait, the kind of thing that appears in your inbox only after being forwarded by that one grandmother who had parts of her brain suffocate for a little while.

Naturally, we here at Et tu, Mr. Destructo? were flabbergasted. More importantly, all of us received extensive CIA training in remote viewing. Using only the power of extra-sensory perception, we were able to individually "hack" Amanda Palmer's brain, gaining access to as-yet unwritten poems dedicated to other tragic events in the national news cycle. We have presented these unpublished poems below. However, as remote viewing is sometimes inexact, we have added our names to each poem to account for how different viewers interpreted the raw Palmer data. Thank you for your indulgence.


A Poem For Wayne LaPierre
by GENERAL GANDHI

you don't know how it felt to be suspended in that red Matrix goop but it must've been warmer than this.

you don't know how intimately they've been recording you on CCTV and corporate media cameras and iPhones, you just wanna get home in time for the simple things like a cheese sandwich.

you don't know what the name of those little things on the end of shoelaces are.

you don't know what it means anymore when your buddy says, "Hey, my best pal Wayne, let's shoot guns." you just stare at your perfect fingernails.

you don't know why people find that "who's on first" routine so funny.

you don't know how orgasmic the act of unbuttoning your Today's Man polyblend dress shirt is until you do it on top of the Eiffel Tower in the city of lights itself.

you don't know how vietnamese people got guns.

you don't know how convinced those dummies were when you said their kids should've been packing the deadly heat of blue steel.

you don't know how precious your iPhone battery time was until you're hiding in a Hilton bathroom from some nutbar screaming about her dumb dead son.

you don't know why these trash teens are playing violent video games on newgrounds.com that tell them to assassinate their parents.

you don't know how it's possible that a floating plastic bag can be so beautiful.

you don't know why life moves pretty fast, and that if you don't stop to look around, you might miss it.

you don't know what Duck Hunt is. lol what is that. is it guns?

you don't know how to make sense of this "bad gun man" meme. what is a meme. you don't even know, you're a mature patriot.

you don't know how to believe anyone anymore.

you don't know how to tell Sen. Kay Hagan (D-NC) that even though she wants to slaughter law-abiding good guys and line Obama's birdcage with the constitution, you just want to dance in the rain with her. get goofy holding hands.

you don't know how to explain yourself.

you don't want the bullshit anymore.

you don't know what it would be like to fire a full 5.56x45mm NATO disintegrating belt through a Heckler & Koch MG4 the full length of a y-boat. this is awesome and really cool to think about.

you don't know why somebody didn't shoot those gun guys in the cradle of liberty itself Boston, Mass.

you don't know how to use chopsticks.

you don't know how what prescription your glasses are. lol you just leave that to the doctors

you don't know if it's ok for you to go see that new Batman movie since the guy with the gun did that thing. it's not fair. it doesn't seem fair that you cant see Bane.

you don't have "two tickets to the gun show."

you don't know why Tim Conway isn't in more stuff. he made you laugh and laugh.

you don't know how Tim Conway did that thing in the golf course sand trap where he looked really short but you laugh just thinking about it.

you don't know if it's legal to wear your Colt single action army "Peacemaker" on a cool snakeskin holster your cousin Nevin got in Mexico to your congressional testimony, but you're living out loud, my man, and don't give a fuck.

you don't know how to set up "mouse trap."

you don't know why people are so mean about your favorite machines. your favorite machine is of course the gun, my dude.

you don't know how to get that barista's number or try and not get it but take it like a champ.

you don't know...yourself? sometimes?

you don't know the way to Sandy Hook.

you don't know the way to the Batman movie theater in Colorado.

you don't know the way to Columbine.

you don't know the way to San Jose.


A Poem for Reese Witherspoon
by JEB LUND

you don't know what this blue serge pantsuit feels like, but I assure you that it's amazing.

you don't know how little you've been paying attention to carbs until you look down at your legs again.

you don't know how many times you can say you're coming until they just give up because their jaw hurts and they're crouching over on the bed and would have gotten into a more comfortable position in the first place, but they didn't think it would take this long.

you don't know how orgasmic the act can be because, well (see above).

you don't know how many vietnamese au pairs to order.

you don't know how convinced your parents were that becoming a fashion model for a florist's television advertisements would be "baller," or whatever argot people used in 1983.

you don't know Al Michaels by any chance, do you?

you don't know how precious your iphone battery time is until you have to start googling prison anti-lesbian tips 'n' tricks.

you don't know how to get away from your fucking parents in fucking Alabama, but you also don't know how deeply you still love your first husband, Jake (Josh Lucas).

you don't know how you found yourself living in a shotgun shack.

you don't know how things could change so incredibly fast in this large automobile.

you don't know how you didn't see that glutinous donut eater lurking by the side of the road in a fucking Crown Vic with his radar-dick wangling out of the side window.

you don’t know how to make sense of this massive parade, foreign debts, homeless vets, AIDS, crack, Bernie Goetz, hypodermics on the shore, or China under martial law but not anymore, Junior John Kennedy, Master P, make 'em say Kim Jong-Unnnnngh.

you don't know how everything I tell you could be a lie.

you don't know how I'm Mudd.

you don't want two percent, but I pay scale on this tour.

you don't know why you let that session guy go without shooting him dead and stuffing him in some bushes between cambridge and watertown.

you don't know where your friends went, you don't know what the smile on my face meant, you don't like how the prison door goes boom boom boom.

you don't know how you drove into this trap so obliviously.

you don't actually know shit about the law.

you don't know what Matthew Broderick was thinking when he was fucking his wife.

you don't even think that guy is a real cop, anyway.

you don't know how it feels.

you don't know how it feels.

you don't know how it feels.

     to be meeeeeee...

— FIN —