Lip Gloss and Laxatives

I got caught shoplifting lip gloss
and laxatives yesterday. 
I pleaded with the judge
that I was too embarrassed
to pay for those items
at the register in front
of everyone, but she shook
her head, gave me sixty hours
of community service down
at the county homeless shelter.
I don’t mind too much, though,
at least there’ll be nobody there
I’ll feel like kissing, and I know
I can help myself to a big bowl
of the bean soup I’ll be ladling out
which will solve my other problem, too.

Pavlovian 

When you write to me “darlin” I run a bath,
scalding and scented, flesh perfumed, punished
on your behalf. Far away masters have
local effects between the shorn sluttish 
succulent lips and the cervix.  You saturate 
me on the inside.  This flesh arid, clothed 
is duplicitous pride you would berate 
if you could see.  I am a beast you exposed 
obsessively until I learned to spurn 
humanity myself, to proffer pink skin,
a wet wishing well.  Conditioned to yearn, 
wait my turn until summoned again, 
with a prim presentation playing pretend —
just a trained animal, Pavlovian. 

Nietzsche

You think of Nietzsche 
that famous dour profile of his,
like a man appearing angered
as if someone owes him money
some time now and he’s just seen them
walking around with new sneakers on
or something,
and you think of him in his later years
getting bitterer and bitterer 
and lonelier and lonelier still
as he lost work left and right
and you think of him walking home 
cloaked in failure, with dark dark thoughts 
just tap dancing their way through his head 
and as Aurelius said:
Your thoughts paint
the color of your soul

And you think of Nietzsche’s soul
how black it must have been in that
cold German weather —
and you think if only he’d got some good pussy
every now and then, not saying a lot,
or if that cunt in high school hadn’t broke his heart
or if Salome, a woman he instantly fell in all with
upon seeing for the first time in Paris,
which sounds dumb when you think
he’s supposed to be a genius or something,
she’d agree to become his wife,
and take that bitterness off his shoulders
with a hot meal every night 
and maybe, if she gorged on his balls
and shoved his dick so far down her throat
her eyes would go crossed

And maybe, if at night
she’d caress his tormented brow
and whisper in the darkness of their room 
that her precious Friedr was respected
and appreciated though not fully understood
for his unparalleled genius, and that
she loved him and that she would 
always be there for him
and that next time he went down on her
he’d better have his mustache
combed upwards

Or whatever they said back in those times
But then again, who was he of all people
to land an angel like that

Evening Machines

Painted ladies duck
from fiends under velvet skies,
‘round corners and doorways,

as God’s chosen saves
souls of passersby and
dogs in search of scraps.

Shirtless boys show’r girls
on stoops with shucks and jives to
clanking coins in cans

of bums, patrolling
slices of concrete, splashed with
piss and hot dog wat’r.

Street kids linger ‘round 
fronts of liquor stores with fists 
of cash, cruising dupes,

for ill-gotten smokes
and cheap beer before managers 
close shop for the night.

‘lectric lines crackle
and neon signs hum above,
overseeing the chain-gang.

***

Originally published in Terror House Magazine

Theater of War

The first mistake was to believe
that things would stay the same.
The second was to think
that things would change.

In between scenes the players
try on new costumes
and practice new words.

Masks and makeup
can alter features,
but underneath 
the characters are the same,

archetypes of politics,
power and murder.
All wars, little and big,
are fought with the same armies.

And the dead? Well,
they’ve said their lines
and moved on to other plays
on other stages,

still waiting 
for the applause
and curtain calls
that never seem to come.

Orbiting Bodies

Falling in love,
Isn’t as easy as it sounds.

Not as easy as falling into a stranger’s bed.
(The only place I want to be)

At first the head spins,
And then the heart pounds.

And the juices flow,
And the pulse moves south.

Love knows what it wants,
And so does my heart.

But sometime I can’t hear it
Because of how tight my pants get,
And how loud my need to breed.

I’ve been so desperate I’ve fucked a helpless twink
Against an overflowing urinal in a filthy Vegas club.
(strike that: help-full twink)

I’ve also been elbow deep in a stranger, while balls deep in his throat,
Looking at the proverbial fourth wall
Telling the audience:
Now you might be wondering how I got in this position.

And I made both cum faster than I could’ve ordered another drink at the bar.

I’ve also bloodied my knees several evenings gulping down over a dozen cocks in one sitting
Lust drunk and ready to swallow every flood as the levees and dams burst.

Bodies in lust trip over one another trying to get to the finish line together.

Cheering and basking in a puddle post-coital
is an addiction,
And trust me I don’t fucking need rehab.

What I need is you to get out of my face so I can go to the parking lot and enjoy this blunt.

Round two starts in half an hour. 

The Nature of Gothic

I once met a Goth girl in a bar 
who said she was a comic,
yet her deadpan demeanour 
revealed no trace of humour.
She was fun but not really funny.
After a number of drinks—
and a few knowing winks,
she invited me back to her place—
well, I had run out of money. 
Once there, one thing led to another, 
or rather, one thing led to THE other… 

As I was undressing her, 
it gradually dawned on me 
why she referred to herself as a comic.
She didn’t do stand-up or even tell jokes,
she was literally an anatomic, 
graphic novel. Her body, covered 
in a variety of tattoos, told a story 
as she lay, spread out on the bed; 
in fact, several stories,
if you varied the order 
in which her vignettes were read. 

Her left breast portrayed Scylla.
One of the writhing heads was the nipple.
The right one was Charybdis
and that nipple mimicked the ripple 
in the eye of the whirlpool. 
My Goth! A girl with a classics degree!
I was deeply impressed 
when she was undressed
as reading her stories in various ways, 
say, jumping about like the knight’s forays,
in chess, you could follow Aeneas’s route
through her very own silicone valley, 
between Scylla and Charybdis
an experience I had no wish to miss. 
Choosing the bishop’s moves would
produce Jason and the Argonauts’ tale 
and finally, the rook’s moves could
reproduce the story of Odysseus. 
I kid you not. I am being serious.

Below her navel, it got more OT, 
as in ‘over the top’ and Old Testament: 
The figure of Moses held up a sign
that said: “Roll up! Roll up! This way 
to the burning bush!” Here was the shrine
in my Goth’s promised land. 
“I’m on fire,” she said. “Please put it out!”
“Of course,” I replied, “no need to shout.
I’m holding the hose in my hand!”

Turning her over onto her front 
produced an eye-popping scene: 
the whole of her back 
represented a classic foxhunt
with the hounds heading south
toward her …. nether regions.
“D’you ken John Peel with his coat so gay,
“D’you ken John Peel at the break of day,”
I hummed to myself.

Several other red-coated men
mounted on stallions were
galloping down to her crack 
with a pack of hounds in full cry. 
The weary young fox, naturally sly,
had entered the crevice
of her plump rump, 
leaving only its brush 
sticking out like a rush.
(Even Aesop wasn’t able
to write a fable about an ass
swallowing a fox!)

The Goth lifted up her rounded cheeks, 
for the hunt to run uphill.
Now apart from the extra thrill,
it gave me the chance to look inside
to see where the fox had managed to hide…
As I say, she was a comic. 
Not really funny, but polychromic.

DRIVE

I love the way you drive

It’s like the way you love, full throttle with the most reckless of intentions

The streetlights seem to bow and dim upon your approach, like sentries guarding the darkness ahead, signaling safe passage

Your kisses become comfort in the low lights of the dashboard, but I’ve never encountered someone with such passionate monsters

You chase your engine like an armed pilgrim, on the way to lay siege to the promised land, shrieking back into the disappearing landscape 

What is it of rot and ruin, that pursues you with such wretched conviction?

As the icy road passes underneath with quiet caress, we barrel into a new dawn of deliverance, carrying the spark that will ignite the fires of reckoning

Where we will stand witness to the decline of the benevolence of slaughter

Together, We Are Monsters

My film is not a dream. 
It is a giallo birthed from a Hammer film. 
British cleavage blood-drenched in Italian fantasy. 
Dubbed English heightens the unreality
of me, former Puerto Rican altar boy, 
looming behind you, white girl.
You. Turn.    
Out of lips synced too precisely to my libido
you purr, “I never try anything. I just do it.” 
A quiet bang 
spreads across my mind 
in thick viscera. 
I do not know who the monster is. 
There is a rusty gleam, 
smearing over this flick like a money shot,
gratuitous, just shy of pornographic. 
Unless, a person can feel pornography.
My deepest rape fantasies 
intertwining with my sticky heart strings in a tangled, 
messy 
scream 
for you.  

There are many questions posed in my scream, a bouquet: 
venus fly traps, triffids, flowers that inhale moonlight. 
Why can’t I love with sobriety? 
How do I work through embracing my nightmares doggystyle? 
Why can’t I convince you I’m a risk worth taking?  
Did the first two questions answer the third? 
“I want to carry you off to my Black Lagoon.”  
What would you do with this truth?

Compress the questions down my throat like coal. The result:
not a diamond for an Adam’s apple but a puzzlebox. 
The solution is speech, 
but these hallelujahs are for The Scarlet Gospels 
according to Clive Barker. 
It is his angels, 
leather-strapped Cenobites,
I’ll call forth. 
They have such sights to show us,
and they would make deals with me. 
Finally, I’d bend you to my will, and throwing my 
soul to Leviathan is small price, 
but the questions would still be questions
stalking my cobwebbed halls in a porn-shaped zombie of you,
hardly the love poem I had in mind, 
so I forsake the best of all possible
hells for intellectual torture porn. 
Pinhead is disappointed. 
Writhing coffins for two cannot compete 
with my need to be a student of you. 
I’d rather be caught staring into your cleavage, 
possessed by a male gaze, 
riding the sight line to the sin line 
in hopes of finding something less human 
housing a moment of honesty with whatever
Transylvania lurks
under your full moon flesh — 

But hell is full of rebels and compulsive explorers. 
Pinhead turns my gaze to the souls raised and struck down, 
raised and struck down in Styxxxian pools:
flaming liars, cheats, the insatiable kindred spirits. 
I see black sabbath tears,
and black tears congeal into a viscera that never lies or cheats. 
The triple x pools sated as the bottom of a lake full of the dead. 
Questions sink like concrete boots,
and the dead hate the living.

The answers rise when the visceral bodies 
popsicle into a black monolith on water’s skin:
Together, we are monsters. 
Bride of Frankenstein, blonde hair like a bishop’s mitre streaked 
with wild cotton, it is not you I fear, it is me, my weakness, 
my inability to make you feel this heart, hung 
from the tallest gallows by The Puritans and love it.