Advertising in the Mutant Rain Forest

with apologies to Bruce Boston and Robert Frazier

“I think that I shall never see
a billboard lovely as a tree.
Indeed, unless the billboards fall,
I’ll never see a tree at all.”
— Ogden Nash

The sky lowers like a petulant duende
as we trudge beneath the canopy of billboards,
many of them already festooned
with the vegetal survivors
of the last advertising campaign,
mostly kudzu and poison ivy.

A master of camouflage nearly escapes
our scrutiny, but only nearly:
even as Williger pauses to take a leak
on one of the larger stanchions,
a monstrous butterfly takes flight
above us, the wind from its massive wings
spraying piss in all directions, including mine.
Its perfect mimicry of Joe the Camel
has fooled us once again.

The rains come heavily
in glutinous gobbets,
transforming the forest floor
into a sucking morass of butterfly droppings
that palpitates like sentient mud.
Several billboards lean precariously
as the ground beneath them
is undermined by the deluge.
We shore them up desperately,
but to no avail: one by one
they topple like dominoes in endless rows,
crushing numerous giant beavers
in their lodges of plundered real estate ads.
Within minutes we’re surrounded
by a level plain of fallen billboards
that stretches in all directions,
a marketing manager’s nightmare.
Soaked to the bone, we pitch our tents
by the light of phosphorescent millipedes
and talk about the next advertising campaign.