"Like pissing wine into an ocean of alcoholics"
Check out my brand-new poem YouTube Dickheads Banned My Video on YouTube.
The poem about online censorship and the coming death of free speech was written in response to YouTube recently banning my poetry performance vid Constable Cunt.
It would have to be the only poetry vid of mine that went viral (with 4.3K views) wouldn’t it?
I dragged her by the hair.
stop! she kicked. please!
shut up! I gave her a slap
and cuffed her to the radiator’s pipe.
no, seriously! she said, my phone’s in the other room!
so?
so my dad’s still in the hospital! what if someone rings?
don’t care, I shrugged. in fact, I hope he dies.
then I’ll adopt you and be your new daddy, won’t I?
I left and went to the shop on the corner. got a little thing of milk.
some Doritos. pack of custard creams. Sanjeev asked me if
I saw the match. told him I don’t follow football. but you’re
from Liverpool, he wailed. home of the greatest team in the world!
it’s boring, I said. bunch of rich shampoo models prancing about.
now hockey, that’s a game. can I have a bag, please?
I got back and peeked my head in.
well? I asked.
to be honest, she shrugged, I could take or leave it.
I didn’t go too far?
no, it was exactly like we said, it’s just …
she looked around the room … well, kind of boring.
yeah, I agreed. bit forced, isn’t it.
yeah, that’s it, she said. it’s too over the top, really. and
it’s boring, just lying here, waiting for you.
fair enough. want me to uncuff you?
please, daddy.
then we ate all the custard creams
watching two seasons of Friends.
When you walked through the dance floor,
everyone turned their heads
You wore a gold sequined dress
and rainbow sparkles through your hair
I didn’t even mind when you stole my spleen,
I wasn’t using it anyway
Besides, a man has to give up something
of value to sip bourbon with a Princess
You were talking of existential surgery;
I was thinking about the bomb in the basement,
and the machine gun under our table
I thought it was a shame that
she would soon be blown to pieces;
It seemed such a dirty demise for royalty
Separating gold sequins from entrails
hanging off the ceiling, so as of not to
mix her remains with the bourgeois
Strange, how even in death,
the struggle between classes rages on
Saturday, Saturday, pretty Saturday. The melon-man drives by in his little truck selling cantaloupe and watermelon. Yesterday was Black Friday. People trampled themselves bloody in hideous stampedes for discounted luxury items like mile-wide TVs, video games, flavored underwear, microwaves, who knows what else. I barely got out of bed all day.
Before Natalie got deported, we used to get up at 3:30 a.m. Natalia worked the breakfast shift at McDonald’s and I drove a cab. For 15 years we did that. We hated it, and dreamed of escaping it. Then the decision was made for us. Now we live in this tiny house in Hermosillo with Natalia’s parents. We make do. We try to look at the bright side.
On Thursday night a vagabond lit a fire in the dump behind the house here on Avenida Economia. The houses stretch for a few blocks in a straight line, all flat-topped with cement roofs, separated by a 3-foot gap, so that an agile child can run the length, leaping like a steeplechase over the empty spaces.
I was good and snozzled when we all saw and smelled the smoke. It was no joke, really barreling up like a locomotive. I climbed up the old home-made ladder to the roof of the house to do some surveillance. A cement block wall separates the houses from the dump. The blaze was rising like crazy in the dark night. Holy shit! A million mercurochrome tentacles. The unspeakable crackling, like glass hibiscus flowers crunched between the yellow teeth of Godzilla. Too much dry grass and garbage back there.
“Hand me the hose!”
I stood up there on the roof and used my thumb to arch the hose water, what little pressure came out of it, over the cement block wall into the flames. It helped, I warded it off our little area at least. Soon others were up on their roofs doing the same, or just using buckets. The children were having a hoot, running, screaming, laughing. Everyone else was flooding the street, watching the show. Hell approaching, let’s party! The heat and red light on our faces up there on the roof: booga booga! Good thing Natalia paid the water bill.
I stood with that hose water arching out and it was like pissing in a dream and you just piss and piss and piss. Existence, yes? It took me back to the fires of my youth. All the weenies roasted, all the ants killed with magnifying glasses on summer Illinois days in the ditch-weed. My grandfather’s bonfires in the back 40, throwing an old tire on there to really get it going, that furious black tunnel of smoke crawling up into the sky, so thick it seemed you could climb it like Jack and the Beanstalk. Fires on the banks of the Illinois river among the dead fish and the oily water and the train tracks where the trains came with their howling wind and madness.
The fire seemed to come under some control there behind that cement wall in the Hermosillo dump. Whew! Hey, somebody toss me a beer! I stood up there and drank a beer and a neighbor kid launched himself over the gap from the next house and stood next to me, his brown face glowing.
“And you? What do you want, chamaco?” I said.
“Are you from the other side?”
“What gave it away?”
“Is it true what they say?”
“What do they say?”
“That life is better on the other side?”
“No, that’s not true.”
“But people have money there.”
“Some do, yes.”
“Do you have a computer?”
“No. I have a notebook.”
“I don’t have a computer either. Do you have a cell phone?
“Yes I have a cell phone.”
“I don’t. You wouldn’t have an old one you don’t want anymore?”
“I’m sorry, I don’t. Who you gonna call, anyway?”
“I don’t know. Somebody.”
“Does your father know where you’re at?”
“No.”
“What’s your father do?”
“He’s a bricklayer.”
“That’s a noble profession. He sounds like a good man.”
“Yeah.”
I gave him a 20 peso note and he shot off like a spark over the rooftops. Other children watched me from the dark, little raccoon eyes. The crowd on the street was giddy and we were all almost sad to see that the fire had given up. It never did leap the cement block wall. I climbed down from the roof and finished my beer at my little table with the spiders. Natalia and everyone filtered back into the houses.
An hour later the fire truck came. The firemen stood around the truck looking at the remnants of the coals for a while, then they left. I sat in the dark. I wondered how we were going to make it, living in Hermosillo with our money running out. I reached my hand into the beer cooler but there was nothing but dirty melted ice.
A GALLON OF RED, A GALLON OF WHITE
SCUMBAG PRESS
£4.00
14 wine soaked poems by Pete Donohue and John D Robinson. Each chapbook comes with a signed broadside from each poet.
A5 size. Printed on recycled paper. Limited to 30 copies.
I was in North Beach just drinking and walking around.
It was a bright and lovely day with people outside doing things
and feeling generally good about the world.
A scruffy young fellow on the sidewalk
outside a grocery store asked me for a few bucks
but I only had bills bigger than I was willing to give.
I felt bad because there was something about his face
that I liked, an earnestness in his voice that struck me.
I went to the neighborhood record shop and bought
some old Springsteen on vinyl, 9 bucks a pop,
and when I came out I passed the kid again and gave him
the few dollars I had left.
He thanked me profusely with his earnest voice
and I told him he was quite welcome and continued on.
I was two blocks away when he ran up behind me
and touched my arm. Hey, he said, hey!
I stopped and turned and he said,
I just wanna be straight with you bro,
all I’m gonna do is buy a beer!
I gave him a thumbs up and told him
that I planned to do the same.
He smiled and nodded, returned my thumbs up
and disappeared into Big Al’s liquor store.
I went home and drank a sixer of some new
hipster ale as I leaned back and listened
to the Boss tell it like it was.
mum’s got a job in a morgue.
she’s not trained or nothing, but they’re letting her help out
as some trainee assistant blood drainer, or something like that.
she said she’ll take me some time to watch.
if she leaves the room to go the toilet or whatever,
I could suck a tit. maybe stick my fingers in the corpse’s fanny.
maybe more.
jesus, don’t you have any imagination? I asked.
wank about it if you have to.
but you don’t have to actually do it.
it’s ok, he said. they’re dead. they can’t fight back.
and anyway, you don’t need their permission,
cos it’s not them anymore. it’s just a body. their soul’s gone.
or, I suggested, you could just, you know,
go and meet someone real and maybe charm them?
he shook his head. you’ve got no ambition, he sighed.
look, if it’s the lifeless thing that does it for you,
at least, I don’t know, get a mannequin or something. I don’t know.
a mannequin! he clapped his hands. shit, of course!
bit hard, all that plastic, like. but I can always drill holes in them
and put like, cotton in them or something, can’t I? no,
not cotton, fluff would stick to me bell end. what can I …
warm jelly? I proposed, before I could stop myself.
warm jelly! genius! he hugged me. you’re a genius, you are!
can you get me one? your shop does clothes, doesn’t it?
they have mannequins, don’t they? you could get me one,
couldn’t you?
I didn’t say anything.
or do you have already have one? you do, don’t you?
you’ve already nicked one.
that’s how you knew to use warm jelly, wasn’t it?
I didn’t say anything.
and you can’t steal another, because then they’ll be onto you.
well that’s ok, I can just borrow yours. what’s her name?
Rosanna, I said.
nice. nice slutty name, that. so can I borrow Rosanna?
I’ll put my own jelly in her.
she left me, I said.
he narrowed his eyes and studied me.
you’re weird, he concluded …
couple of days later, I’m walking to work
and a car horn beeps.
I turn and it’s him and his mum.
he waves out of the passenger window.
they on their way to the morgue? I wondered.
wait till Rosanna hears about this.
BLACK SUMMER: New & Selected Poems
Kung Fu Treachery Press
234 pages
Things you will not see in Wayne F. Burke’s bio for his new book, Black Summer: pronouns, accrued university degrees, editorships at magazines, grants received, where he teaches, how beautiful his wife is, how he loves gardening, the name of his cat. How he got a book published without these things in his bio, I have no idea. He has been reported.
Wayne F. Burke is 65 (going on 66) years old. He reminds me a little of Ed Galing, who wrote poems into his 90’s. When I used to see Galing in a publication I always read his poems first not because he was old but because I knew he wouldn’t bullshit me. I knew there would be no slickness or pretentiousness, no metaphors stretched out so far you forgot where they started, no look-at-me-being-a-poet, pat me on the head, junk. Just a sensitive, sometimes fucked-up, lonely person writing about the moments of his life.
There are lots of stray hairs in these poems. Yes, Burke, like Galing, ends lines with prepositions sometimes. Yes, his endings fizzle sometimes. Yes, he’s an old cis white guy who doesn’t hide his flaws. All unforgiveable sins these days, when most poets pretend to be saints.
Burke is no saint, and what fresh air that is:
“I walked upstream through the
woods, among the trees
and rocks
to a quiet place
below the falls
I took my pants off
and sat
in the sun
I was having a herpes attack
boils on my dick
and thought the sun
might fix me up a little
as I listened to the river…”
One out of 6 people have herpes but you don’t see it mentioned much in poetry. Usually when a poet sits down by the river it’s to tell the reader how enlightened they are, which always somehow seems to indicate how UNENLIGHTENED the rest of us are. Why didn’t you USE A CONDOM?
At least he’s getting laid by real women and not watching porn. He’s an old timer. Never married, though, at least not in these poems. Now that he’s retired, maybe he will meet a nice Mexican girl.
Burke asked a “famous” poet to read his poems and wrote this about it:
“he was known as the poet of loneliness and
was married to the poetess of bereavement.
Before leaving, I asked what he really thought of
my things, and
he said, well
they are all on the surface
no depth to them;
read other things beside literature, he suggested
like “Kramer’s book on aesthetics.”
I thanked him and he left.
I was the poet of surfaceness.”
I like that he says “surfaceness” instead of “surfaces,” as if to poke fun at himself and at the same time to make fun of the “famous” poet. Of course, the “famous” poet meant that his poems were superficial. What this means to me is the “famous” poet couldn’t see beyond the “surface” of the poems, which are not refined or polished as most poets like them to be. In my view, poems that are most polished on the surface don’t have more depth, just more make-up.
Fighting and real-world conflict are everywhere in these poems:
Punks
standing on the main street of Framingham, Massachusetts
holding my thumb up
in the air
and watching all the cars in the world
drive by me
and all the drivers look like assholes
to me
and a car goes past with some punks inside
and one punk gives me the middle-finger
and I turn and chase the car
as the punks point and
laugh at me until
their car slows then stops at a red light
and I gain ground
and the smiles of the punks disappear
their eyes widen like doll’s eyes
and the car squeals out and
I chase it to the
next light
and the punks in the back seat hop around
like monkeys in a cage
as I close the gap again
and the car shoots ahead
and I chase it to the next red light
which the car blows through
and I give up,
out of breath
still pissed
but not really
about
a bunch of punks.
I thought this poem was funny and sad at the same time. Who can’t feel the desperation of this narrator, running down the street like a crazy pissed-off loser? Who hasn’t wanted to do the same? The ending lines tell us what we already feel: this is not just about surfaces.
Burke makes me laugh. I smiled and laughed throughout this book:
Moider
a squirrel in the park, plump
7 to 8 inches in height
svelte gray coat
attacked a girl
who later died
and the cops went berserk
guns blasting and
killed two hundred squirrels
but none of the witnesses
to the attack
could positively ID the perp
so the cops put out an APB with
an artist’s sketch of
the killer-squirrel
which brought 1000 calls
into the station house
but
as of this writing
the suspect remains at large
possibly
up a tree
or
in some hole in a wall.
Burke’s childhood poems are some of the best in the collection:
Beach
a hot muggy day
no one to play with
all the kids gone
to the beach
Charlie Baguette told me I could go
with him
his family
I ran home for my suit
and when I returned
they had already gone…
I climbed the tree in the yard
and sat
hidden by dinner-plate-sized leaves.
I picked my nose until it bled;
meanwhile, the sky turned milky-white and
I was glad (maybe
the Baguette’s would be drowned
in the coming storm).
I climbed down and lay in the
driveway on hot cinder
that felt like sand;
I hoped I got run over.
I watched a bird
a speck
far above
until
it disappeared.
In another poem, the narrator child is waiting for “gramps” to come and give him a ride home from “pee wee” football practice, but gramps is late. The kid climbs a tree while waiting and someone throws a rock at him, calling him a raccoon. Kids climb trees all the time, but in this situation, it highlights the isolation of the boy. Gramps finally shows up and the poem ends with Gramps giving “a mumbled apology.” Not a very dramatic ending. Maybe Burke could have “worded” it a different way. Maybe a certain type of “line break” would have made it better. But if you’ve ever been the last kid standing, waiting for a ride home, from anywhere, you’ll understand.
I really liked this sweet poem, “Ice Cream.” An editor would surely quip about the title and the lack of punctuation, but would that really change anything? Would that change the idiocy of pubescent kids? Would that change the innocence? Should we refine natural metaphor into over-your-head metaphor? In order to write a simple poem like this, you have to have grown old and stayed young at the same time:
Ice Cream
A maple walnut ice cream cone
10-cents
at Eileen’s Dairy bar
where Rose
a teenage waitress
Eileen’s daughter
tall and slender,
“a rose yet to bloom”
I told Johnny Garibaldi
who had asked what I thought
of her
the words coming unbidden from
my lips
he blabbed it
and I regretted many times over
a rose yet to bloom
shouted on the street
on the school bus
I stayed away from Eileen’s until
desperate for an ice cream
pistachio, butter pecan, black raspberry
I put my thin dime
into Rose’s hand
and she did not say
anything
except
“thank you.”
Several short poems are included in the book. I don’t know if they’re haiku or what, but I like them:
Palm Sunday—
my brother and I
whip each other with palms
and
My jacket—
hung by the neck
until spring
This is a good book of poetry. Like most books of poetry, it could be cut by a third. The problem is, every person who reads it might want to cut a different third. Not bad, for an old cis white guy who doesn’t even have a cat in his bio and probably never been to a writer’s conference in his whole miserable life.
I wrote a zine about online dating and I like to share it with people I’m trying to date, even though it gives me intense anxiety to do so. It’s an accurate (though fictionalized) portrait of my troubled relationship with sex and men and life, and it’s full of things I want potential partners to know about me. Such as: I’m a great fucking writer; I write about extremely intimate topics; I prefer ethical non-monogamy; I’m a slut; I don’t think slut is a bad word.
The problem is, sometimes I feel like slut is a bad word. My defiant reclamation of the title is still in process. When I got called a slut in high school, it was most definitely a bad word, used both to hurt and classify me. When other people hear me use the word to describe myself, some of them are shocked and appalled. Using the word as a shameless celebration of myself, applying the term on my own terms, is an ongoing fight.
Last summer I met this dude on social media, (we’ll call him Brad) and we started interacting a lot, and we both felt a pretty magical spark of connection. This was during early lockdown, when everyone was reeling from sudden intense isolation. We were chatting and video chatting a bunch. He’d never had such an experience with someone he met online, and he felt weird about it. I decided to make it more weird by sending him the zine. I warned him in advance of the salient & sordid features, and I said I would understand if he didn’t want to read it.
About seven minutes later, Brad texted back the following:
Oh God, this is just a catalog of dudes you boned.
Now. The zine is like 40-some pages long, so I knew he didn’t have time to read the whole thing. There’s definitely sex in it. The protagonist definitely bones a lot of dudes in it. The zine opens with a cast list of characters, many of whom get boned in the course of the zine. Do you like the way I’m repeating the verb? The stupid ridiculous high school verb? Brad is forty years old, and now I know I’ll never bone him.
The thing is, above all else, my zine is about the search for beauty and tenderness and connection. I’m generally not into fucking people for the sake of fucking. I’m sexually adventurous and I’m an inherently, unequivocally sexual being. I love sex. I love humans. I love connection. Sex in its best form, in my opinion, is beautiful human connection, even when it’s casual, often, or kinky. This is, I think, the obvious and overarching thrust of my zine.
So I texted Brad back, no, it’s not.
And he replied, how many?
And I said, I don’t know and
What difference does it make?
And he replied, how many and
Just estimate.
He kept pressing for a number, and the more he did, the more I squirmed internally. Shame, shame, shame.
I have no idea how many. I don’t keep count. I don’t, in fact, own a catalog of all the dudes I’ve boned.
All my favorite people like the zine, and my number one favorite lover loves the zine. His pet name for me is a (secret) phrase that includes the word slut, and he uses it with infinite affection and admiration and I love it. There’s nothing insulting about the way he uses it.
There’s also nothing wrong with people who don’t fancy sluts. Everyone has the right to choose how and with whom they engage. Everyone has the right to determine their own relationship with and opinion about their own sexual behavior. Their own.
The truly fucked up thing about Brad insisting on a number is that I could tell there was a number that would’ve been acceptable to him. In the course of the conversation, that became increasingly clear. If I had fucked under a certain number of people, I would’ve been in a morally acceptable range for him. He didn’t know the actual number, the cutoff point, but he had a general idea of how many was too many. A vague idea in his self about what was a lot and what was a slut.
Well, Brad. I don’t need to know the number to know I’m a slut. I don’t need your morals to tell me whether or not I’m acceptable to myself.
I boned a dozen dudes. A hundred. A thousand. I boned a billion dudes and I loved every minute of it.
There’s no catalog but the one kept in all the corners of my heart, all the contours of my life. Anyone who cares to know me may read it any time, just by looking in my eyes.
In the old song,
Johnny Cash sang that
He took a shot of cocaine
And shot his woman down.
Now, that just ain’t right.
He musta been doin’
Something wrong.
If you do a proper shot of coke
You ain’t doin’ mucha nothin’
For a while. Just kickin’ back
Goin’ with the feelin’ and
Not even givin’ a shit that
Your woman’s no good.
Hell, you ain’t even gonna
Make it to work if you got a job.
You don’t even give a shit
‘Bout the curtains fluttering
By the ashtray catching fire.
It’s a free light show and
When you come down enough,
You might manage to escape.
Best you can do is float out
Onto the front lawn enjoyin’
The lay in the cool grass.
The ambulance guys come and
Give you oxygen and that
Makes you laugh just before
You up chuck all last night’s
Pizza and beer.
Horror Sleaze Trash 