Ted Berrigan Surveys Season Five of 'Mad Men' And It Is Good Part 1

Ted Berrigan Surveys Season Five of ‘Mad Men’ And It Is Good Part 1

05x01 A Little Kiss

Whither our Pete Campbell shaming

strangers for their water stunts

or writhing on a well-appointed carpet

singing a song that doesn’t exist yet.

What I remember is the ‘ballet of beans’

and young men digging their hands in

to a bowl of interesting nutrients.

Mock mock-ads after that who would not

Lift a window-latch, wear hounds-tooth

to writhe on a well-appointed pane of glass.

If anybody is reading books, I don’t know about it,

if anybody’s market research is a polished piece of bone.

A poem goes out prowling for some action on the side.

I too in love with photos of some gangster’s sweating bride.

05x02 A Little Kiss

I too in love with photos of some gangster’s sweating bride

segued smoothly into a domestic scene

featuring babies, broken appliances,

extras cleaning anachronistic guns in the shadows.

Everybody goes crazy about a body,

at some point, they look about at a body

and realize that they are one, and they enter

a ‘decade’ and they go crazy about extension.

It can be proved, therefore, by progressive hiring,

that the body doesn’t exist, I wasn’t born,

I can enter a meeting with a bottle of Coke

and not exist, like, at all.

Who can tell the dancer from the dancer from the dancer?

A body dispersed over sunken carpet serves as something like an answer.

05x03 Tea Leaves

A body dispersed over sunken carpet serves as something like an answer

to the challenge issued by teenagers smoking pot

in the face of a demiurge.

Hey, I never asked to set matter into motion,

I never asked to keep airplanes aloft, or swell with venom,

or establish contingency in all future events, or

spiral out of control, gain weight drastically, slough off the bone,

swallow pills in the back of car, or a bag of hamburgers.

Meanwhile, children come back around to eat you.

A handsome nazi dances around and sings

and utilizes momentum to swing his body

around a pole elegantly. It’s cancerous. You can act like a fool

around a woman, and still find yourself fat with grace.

‘Future’ defined as ‘body’ pinioned by ‘event’ to unblinking ‘space.’