Jeff Bezos

is jacking off to Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, his Gen X cock twitching gleefully as he watches the Buckets share a bar of chocolate and moans SO GRATEFUL, SO GRATEFUL FOR ALL THEY HAVE then Grandpa Joe jumps for joy and Jeff ejaculates as wrinkled vein and atrophied toe and golden corns hits the peeling wood, whines in tap dance that ANYONE, EVERYONE CAN WORK

like warehouse workers
who chew wax daffodils,
recite poetry, piss their pants
for him, for his pure imagination—gorging on their children

    who slip on fresh licorice grass, fall into his fudge river

except there’s nothing, nothing to it

at all

no fudge no chocolate
it’s just wet
brown
filled with pennies
more pennies than water
more pennies than chocolate

 before Charlie flies in the great glass elevator, Jeff joins in shouting

CHEER UP CHARLIE

where’s that SMILE

what happened to THAT

SMILE

he knew it’s gotta be a test
a test
Jeff loves to watch Charlie Bucket pass the test
eat escargot with slugs and slimeballs
neocolonial chocolatiers

(when you yell at a child who took candy for his family
you’ve won you’ve won YOU’VE WON
did you know it’s still yelling)

forgive me for putting you through this
but you’ve passed
the test
the test of chewing a wax narcissus

don’t forget what happened to the man who suddenly got everything he always wanted
Jeff knows he’s that man, the man living happily ever after
because he lives
glassed up in velvet sheets
milking his prostate with rolls of quarters

more pennies than chocolate

more pennies than water

italicized lines are direct or adapted from Mel Stuarts’s 1971 film Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory

JILLIAN A. FANTIN

Jillian A. Fantin is an MFA candidate specializing in poetry at the University of Notre Dame. Their poetry focuses on explicating the bizarre with Baroque decadence, nourishing the autonomy of the marginalized, metaphorizing memory, and cramming people, moments, and pop culture together into casino-esque shenanigans. Jillian’s poetry has been published or is forthcoming in Wide Angle: A Journal of Literature and Film, The American Journal of Poetry, and Entropy.