Moribund

poetry is moribund
lil peep wrote better than us
meat computer writes better than us
poetry is a lame ass art form
too worn out
rimbaud would be doing something
different today i promise you

i wish i made fashion
8th art
or video games
9th art
even better
90’s video games
or hypermodern trap
or post anti folk
but u r stuck with me for a bit
if u still want to be that is
i am stuck with me, being me,
for ever and ever and ever ever ever.

how to be cool after van gogh, basquiat, modigliani,
rimbe, nick drake, césar aira, duchamp, alfred jarry,
manuel antonio, kafka, pessoa,
rosalía de castro, cervantes…
and the sky
and the sea
and the deeply rooted trees.

First Date Fart

call it a way of weeding them out—
the too uptight ones
the insane, pretty ones
the ones like so many Jersey girls
I’ve known…
obsessed with appearances 

I’ll make it look 
like an accident—
“Whoops! Sorry about that!”

any reaction 
but laughter
will be an immediate 
red flag—

because if THIS 
is a problem 
what else
will I have to hide?

Vampire Wine

The label read “Vampire”
“A merlot as sweet as blood”
But blood’s not sweet
Just the heart’s thing to pump
And if it is sucked out
The heart is low and dry
A tough squeeze and cry

The story:
Love drinks wine
Gets intoxicated
Chit-chats lotsa shit
Bits of bric-a-brac
Cool conversation
Masking the heat
Beneath the clothes
That want to come off
And lie like a heart
Body sucked out
A pudding without the pud

Love toasts itself
Two vampires
In the bite of night
Screeching like bats
Growling like wolves
Two moaning carcasses
Without a mind

Love has drama

The “ever after”
An empty bottle
With just a label

Romantics are monsters

The Empire Strikes Back

Up before sunrise.
Late night. Two hours of sleep.
Last call then fucking at her place. She was closer.
She sounded satisfied. Maybe the whiskey helped. 
Both of us mid-forties, lonely. Saturday night blues.
She liked my Charles Vess Death t-shirt.
I liked that she liked.
Her cleavage and smile helped.

There’s no offer of breakfast.
I wash my cock and balls in her bathroom sink. 
Never a boy scout, never swore the oath,
but I improvise. Tooth paste on my finger.

In search of my pants, I notice her walls
are decorated by images of Star Wars.
Old school – Vader, Fett, Tusken Raiders,
the Cantina scene. Even Bossk.

I grab her ass and kiss her
with what’s left of last night’s passion,
hoping she’s game for a sequel.

Write About Your Favorite Color

I like orange. But not the bright and bubbly kind. The dirty kind, like rust. The iris of rock doves, or pigeons’ eyeballs if you like.

I also like its neighbor, Dirty Yellow. Like mustard. The color of forgotten couches and curtains smelling of mildew and… dirty yellow.

I even like my pink dirty. Like intestines. Or a ballet slipper stained with sweat. And on the darker side of the spectrum, a dead rose, crusty like dried blood.

Imagine if every color were named after the dirtiest version of itself. “Burgundy” becomes “Dried Blood.” “Teal” becomes “mold.” Now mold is a versatile color. Everyone’s favorite color can be found in mold form. Mold is prismatic, polychromatic, breaking barriers, breaking…moulds. The Emperor’s New Clothes was just mold all along. Kind of ironic seeing as mold is one of the earth’s oldest life forms. The Emperor’s Old Mold. Beautiful.

And All That Shit

For Christ’s sakes, Mary, Joseph told her.
You’ve got to stop crying and staring out
that fucking window. Face it, Jesus died 
on the cross, no matter what that crazy bitch
Mary whatshername says, and that’s that.
He’s just not coming back. Ever.

This was in the summer, months after
the crucifixion. Mary had barely changed
her clothes since then, spent her days 
in total silence with cigarettes and bourbon.

It’s more than that, Mary said as she walked 
over and sat opposite Joseph at the kitchen table.
She lit up a fresh Marlboro, told him she had
something to tell him. What’s that?
her husband asked.
You know that whole story about the virgin birth?
she asked. When he nodded, she continued,
Well, don’t get angry or upset,
but it was all bullshit.
Jesus’s father was some Roman soldier, definitely
not God. We met one night at a club,
we were so young back then
and drinking and dancing and doing Ecstasy 
and he promised to pull out, but . . . 
Her voice trailed off into silence, she made
a little palms up gesture. You mean, you weren’t
really the Virgin Mary after all? Joseph demanded.
Hardly, she replied,
then made a sound like a snorting horse.
Joseph said he felt like throwing up. Mary pushed
the bottle of Jim Beam across the table, urged him
to have a drink instead. 

Later, when Joseph had finally stopped crying
and the bottle was almost empty, Mary was back
at the window. She asked him how in the hell 
he ever believed her ridiculous story anyway when 
everybody else in Galilee knew she was a party girl 
prone to big lies. I don’t know, he replied sounding 
like he was going to start crying again. I guess 
because life is so much easier if you believe
in God and miracles and all that shit.
Ha! said Mary, still waiting at the window,
fucking tell me all about it. 

The Quick Side of Night, Wailing 

Rita is on the edge
of town tonight 
the sound of the rails 
are coming in like rain
through a hole in the roof

just one more thing
you can’t keep out

when is love not more give than take 
the car is rolling and there’s no brakes 
something about the levee can’t hold back
when the floodplain / the vein / just gives right in

been through the burnout / rehab stints /
the decades of bad luck / bad checks /
old story / you know it?
then don’t look down like that
on what you ain’t, for one second,
been in knee deep
and no way out

trash bag on her car window
it’s no fucking metaphor
it’s making due
with whatever you have tucked
underneath the driver’s seat

there must be light
in all this somewhere
or else why even try, right?

you open the book
and not a damn word of it
feels right tonight
Rita’s chucking bottles at trains 
screaming about Ray and Daddy 
and when
oh fucking when
is it gonna end 

you think the night is long?
you’ve no idea 
how fast it goes 
down here

Doing it Right

Everything, and I mean everything, is burning.
The night of her 31st birthday: the smell
of the car tires squealing, pinning me in the garage,
the rush of blood from her slap across the face,
pussy juices on the couch, the lingering of fucking
in the air like the house was haunted,
streaks of dust across the glass, small grains
spilling down onto the rug. A tiny white landscapes
where generations of ideas will die and be reborn
only to be forgotten in the moment of insertion.

She will split the difference across the arms
of the chair, every orifice, every pore – wide open
and yearning – a flock for the shepherd. Some
bearded wet Jesus in a dirty bathrobe, screwdriver
and blackberry stained, Guccione’s corpse
on a bender, grave-stained and dick hungry.
What burns harder the fire or the skin under
the flame. Flesh peeling off into its own dance,
Yanvalou summoning until the entire room
is a gnawing mouth shape, a vulval vestibule
that swallows and swallows and swallows.

The end of the night shits open the cracked curtains,
the neighbors, the cats, the birds rattle the walls
like a concert, no one bought tickets for,
and the mountain erupts because it is always
about the mountain, the eruption of bleach
and pineapples, hands sticky and wiped on thighs.
Thick bubblegum. Ripped panties don’t
always spell passion, sometimes just desperation.
Spitting into opens mouths, a long stream down
the face, the sheets ripped up into a skull
and crossbones flag of attack.

Passion is crucified and dirty speak sounds
like Annunaki shit talking. Heaven is not
on the end of a penis or three fingers deep.
It is not pupils as black as dead moons
spinning in a dead orbit in a dead circle,
because what matters is the lava flowing under the bed,
the raw animal machines, pegged time in a ball gag,
the right here and right now of the in there and down there,
the spitting blood and the flowered grotesqueries of fluid.
Because if you are not doing it right, then don’t do it at all.

Thumbing It

Do you remember being young, that time when you were so well hung
that your favourite part would stand, almost on command?
With the aid of gentle foreplay, you could cope five times a day.
Now that you are very old, your shrunken member has grown cold.
Arteries harden, not your dick, every joint makes a loud click,
beta-blockers do their worst, but don’t worry, you’re not the first.
Old age makes you quite sclerotic, which is not at all erotic;
and as you swallow your diuretic, you realize it was not poetic
that your lover scoffed when you were thumbing it in soft

And the Beat Goes On

Dropping from the air 
upon ears like paper blotters on willing tongues,
raging at the bloodlessness of cardboard cutouts
against a shrinking sky,
through psychedelic lenses
let me seeeee, let me beeeee the pulse of silent rage
that rails against the vulgar machine with words
that organize, legitimize, minimize, super-size, tranquilize,
proselytize, tantalize, infantilize, sexualize, stigmatize
the suckled teats of long-conditioned truths.

Poking the bear, disturbing the seas of featureless beige,
stirring the comatose anima with battle-cries of sight and sound
that pierce dusty eardrums like sterling icepicks,
repressed wants teeeeem, solemn faces beeeeeam,
liberated in the warmth of a sun that breaks just beyond
the horizon on coffee-house stages, rousing thoughts
to gestate, ruminate, conjugate, propriate, sublimate, fornicate,
obliterate, determinate, propagate, exfoliate dangerous visions,
birthed from the unfetteredness of a purple haze. 

Fueling the scribblings of furious hands upon white sheets
with whisky and cigarettes,
Making, naked, ugly underbellies of the angst-ridden and inflamed
with the glorious promises of their ecstatic treasure-trails,
let’s revel in the coolness of poetry’s heeeeeat,
indulged in pollen-dusted skin so sweeeeet
within the honeyed tangles of poets’ asymmetries
to detoxify, dulcify, intensify, demystify, purify, glorify, magnify,
beautify, electrify, sanctify our bodily streams of light
that sugar lips and candy fingertips.

Tearing away at the fabric, unraveling,
woven from Gloopstick youth and plasticine smiles,
repulsing at the hordes in their mindless quests
for extra-flavor and double-coupon days,
looking for a steeeeeal, wanting to feeeeel,
as hollow dollars crumble to coins when plopped upon
unsated palms and countertops.

Think! Think! Think! Think! Think! 
We are on the brink 
of the Fall of the American Empire. 
Dig.

*

Originally published at littledeathlit