Interior Degradation

a poem

There is a montage in the film Forrest Gump
where Forrest runs across the country
and again until he decides to stop
and in some of the scenes it was not Tom Hanks running

but you didn't know that
unless you watched him on an interview show
like Letterman or Leno or Graham Norton
where he tells the anecdote

everytime he tells it as if the audience 
doesn't know it, and the host 'just' found out
or is hearing the story for the first time
but I grew up in the golden age of television

and I have seen Tom Hanks give that story
at different ages
on different stages
for 30 years going now

in that time I developed an ulcer
not from drinking
just from stressing
and it grew until it was three inches wide

a hole in my stomach
the first time he told the story
I laughed at it because his brother
does kind of look like him

and from a distance it makes sense
and apparently Tom Hanks paid for the scenes
and got himself a backend deal
which is the opposite of an ulcer

an ulcer is a backend deal
but not with money
mostly with bile and pain
the kind that if you were in The Walking Dead

you would cover yourself with
to escape the walkers
which are slow zombies
the kind that George A. Romero used

and are the only real kind of zombies
and sometimes ulcers cause fever dreams
and I dream of being on Fallon
and telling him the difference between types

the zombies are all falling apart
from whatever thing is killing them
really internal degradation
so their bodies decay visibly

they have an ulcer on the outside
and Tom Hanks wouldn't know that
he hasn't been in a zombie movie
nor has his son Colin

there is a zombie moved called Colin
and another called Hank vs The Undead
not even Jim Hanks who ran as Forrest
ever has run from the undead

the last time he told that story
the last time that I saw it at least
was on Tiktok in vertical format
and he is older now then when 

I first saw him tell it
but I laughed, not at the story
but that he tells it with so much joy
and why not the movie made almost 700 million

and he is healthy and so is Jim and Colin
and even Larry his brother is an etymologist
and the Walking Dead series continues
and one of them is being shot here in my hometown

its not like the ulcer is something I can blame on Tom
but it isn't completely off the table
because the first time he told the story
I laughed until it hurt a bit

and I wonder did Tom Hanks
kind of a slow moving spiritual zombie
bite me from a distance
and I have been degrading internally since?

or was I irked I didn't spot Jim
running in the movie when I was 12
twelve year old John was an idiot
whose behaviors still punish me to this day

so instead of blaming young John
I think I will ask Tom Hanks about it
when I tell this story on Fallon
who loved this poem so much

he asks me to be on his show
in the fever dream that comes
when the pain is so much
that I have to lie down

I like to watch the slow zombies
even as they kill off the characters
and the writing is bad, so bad, so bad
as they go for the last cash grab

but Graham Norton sees me on Fallon
and calls me to come over
and I rip the British to his face
because I am Irish and nothing else

and sometimes we get ulcers
from stress
from the British
so maybe Graham Norton won't want me on after all