adam engel : “boom! boom! boom! go! go! go! get groovin’ to the war”

 

Pumped bodies. Faces taut with grim determination. Diets optimized by scientific know-it-all know-how proven by computer-assisted scientific method. Belief systems built on strong foundations of clinical experimentation repeated for accuracy under stress-increased conditions, peer-reviewed.

 

Hard labor builds hard selves.

 

Trainers, experts in the chemistry of lean architecture. Human form. Pills, shakes, powders, injections; natural herbs; synthetic wonder molecules. A method. Many methods tried and true. Ergonomic machine-designs for comfort in distress. The latest in physical physics. Electric power pull tension for maximum results. Employees would stay firm and young forever.

 

Ubiquitous nutritionists, physicians.

 

Men and women in accord. Sex, sweat, hope. Pure mist of ideal.

 

Entrance to Valhalla decorated with potted Bamboo, Palms, Plants of Paradise.

 

“Faith, purity, mastery. Mind over body, strength of will,” said a passing trainer.

 

Treadmill biking rowing; walking pedaling boating; nowhere; nowhere; nowhere.

 

Overhead screens pumped music and The War into their sweating heads. Imagined themselves in jets, roaring fire up the beastly asshole of that damn rogue Enemy of The Nation! Bomb his demon progeny. Bomb the sandbox. Bomb the swing set. Bomb the schoolyard. Bomb bomb bomb!

 

Pause watch listen. War thrum beat of pop music. Work it, work it, work it out. Tension, release. Minds abandoned pain-wracked bodies to soar among the bomber jets and scream raw lust at stadium crowds. Dancing, loving, worshipful masses. Imaginary famous and adored.

 

“That city’s been around since Time began,” said a Trainer, looking up briefly at the carnage.

 

(Strange indeed to see the Enemy’s capital city, which had stood for three thousand years on the same land, where exotic
generations had lived their unrecorded lives, the same city, through history ancient and modern, reduced to shards and rubble
in a matter of days.)

 

Executive thighs and buttocks pasty-white in shorts. Health premiums reduced significantly and productivity increased when workers spent lunch-breaks in the gym watching The War set to pop music on giant overhead TVs; left cold sweat cubicles for clean hot muscle action.

 

Hour-a-day mental space to press pump cycle soar with sexy dancers grooving to the War.

 

Adam Engel is a Contributing Editor for Cyrano's Journal. Adam has published poetry, fiction, articles, & reviews in several web sites & magazines such as CounterPunch, Dissident Voice, Online Journal, Hudson Review, Accent, The Concord Journal, Beacon, Art World, Ward6 Review, CounterCurrents, LewRockwell.com, Literal Latte, Lummux, POESY, Chronogram, Press Action, & many others. Adam was a featured reader, along with Robert Creeley, Suzanne Pomme Vega, Robert Bly & others at the Woodstock Poetry Festival, August, 2001, where he read from his first book of poetry, ‘Oil & Water’. He can be reached at bartleby.samsa@verizon.net, or at his partially completed (very partially) website at www.adamengel.com.

 

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