Caveboy 1 & 2
Mark Walters
CAVEBOY 1
Hey Caveboy, how’s the cave? Do you still emerge three times a week to bus tables and refill water glasses? Does your beard drip with goat juice? I enjoyed the documentary about your cave paintings. You don't use canvas anymore. When you want to paint something new, you paint paintings on the walls of your house (excuse me, I mean you paint paintings on the walls of your cave). Then you build frames around the paintings and invite everyone over for an art show. You serve ginger ale and marijuana brownies. Everyone gets lit to the hilt and praises you. When your mood turns dark, you moan in the corner and kick everyone out of your house. (Your mood always turns dark.) You paint over the paintings, take a sledgehammer to the walls. You go out and buy more drywall. You repair your cave with drywall and plaster. The documentary filmmaker captured all of this. The documentary filmmaker spoke of your dedication to a surreal vision, but your paintings don't seem all that surreal to me. Ordinary stuff. Houses, sidewalks, goats. Maybe he meant the way you go about things. Maybe he meant your art shows and not your paintings. I watched the DVD extras, where the filmmaker took you out to dinner. You ate bread and fried potatoes. The filmmaker ate a bottle of Scotch. I’m surprised you left the cave for dinner. You hardly leave the cave except to work at the restaurant and to buy more paint and food. The restaurant where you ate with the documentary filmmaker and the restaurant where you work are the same restaurant. During the meal you discussed Don Quixote. You discussed vice-presidents. You discussed how you hated eating at restaurants.
CAVEBOY 2
Hey Caveboy, who's in charge of your city? Is it the hospital administrators? The parking garage attendants? The documentary filmmakers? First came the scientists, then the grants, the studies, the hospitals, and then the administrators. You bit so many people they dedicated a whole wing of a hospital to your victims. When your victims started clawing and chewing on other people, they had to open a brand new hospital. The doctors found a cure for you but they had to shoot all your victims in the head. The city provided you with a small monthly stipend. Soon the tourists arrived, along with tax incentives and parking garages. I learned all of this watching the first Caveboy documentary film. So who all's in charge over there? Is it true a major portion of the city’s economy depends on your study and survival? Even your goats are famous. Some of your goats have websites. Do superfans knock on your front door in hopes of coaxing your inside goats outside? Do anthropologists hide in the bushes along your walk to work, jotting notes to themselves about your gait? What are your thoughts on the theme park they are building west of the city? Do you hear the tour buses rumble down the street from the comfort of your hammock? How many local sandwiches are named after you? Can you remember a time when your city wasn't dwarfed by massive fifteen story parking garages? Do you feel responsible for the art projected onto the sides of the garages, in an attempt to gussy up the city? Have you noticed that when you drive across the city at night, it's like driving through a shitty museum?
MARK WALTERS lives in Omaha, Nebraska. Recent work appears in NAP, Sonora Review, and Juked.
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| Start With Steak | |
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| Lewis Gesner :: | Black Ball |
| David Tomaloff :: | Five Photographs |
| Danica Obradovic :: | The Shortest Ceremony |
| Syllabic Debacle | |
| Mark Walters :: | Caveboy 1 & 2 |
| Larissa Nash :: | The Star |
| Unreal | |
| Jenny McDougal :: | For the Monkey Astronauts of America in the 1950s |
| Adler Planetarium on a Weekend | |
| James Valvis :: | Poem Composed Entirely With Last Lines from James Dickey Poems 1 & 2 |
| T.J. O'Donnell :: | Morning Shift |
| Handmade in Alaska | |
| Emily Glossner Johnson :: | Vladimir Lenin Grown Weary |
| Meg Eden :: | An Old Man Sighted, Planting Poinsettias |
Homage to the Strange Spirits
| Kenneth Patchen :: | Picture Poems |