that time i worked in the adult film industry 

fresh out of high school 
work for a band going nowhere 
girl named Candy 
tells me about a job 

however 

certain inadequacies preclude 
me from front of the camera work 
but a lie about being tech savvy 
and literate gets me in 
an editing room 

hours are my own 
no one asks or cares or 
wonders if i really know 
what i am doing 
and i don’t but i meet 
deadlines 

features, shorts, loops, 
it’s all the same 

any clown can edit 
video on a fast computer 

write blurbs, promotional 
one pagers, fake reviews  
on tedious blog pages 
no one reads 

meet the girls, the guys, 
spend time on set 
find myself dreaming 
of the days working 
with the band on 
Sunset Blvd 
or reading Dostoevsky 
or loading trucks 
12 hours a day 

The Devil Is a Woman

Dangerous women with their
cold as death eyes, their skip
a beat hearts, their Camel straight
speech. All of them awash with
off-the-rack whiskies neat, with
their sailors-on-leave spiels,
their rages and their foam at
the mouth fits, their attitudes and
their habits and their evil ways, and
their never crossed twice bottom lines,
their bodies-on-fire pacts with
harder than stone men. All of them
self-directed even with nowhere to go
and how they went there twice
without compunction or regret,
never once looking back.

All of their razor slit dresses,
naked to the thigh and their V
necks revealing more than they
hide. All of their men so desperate
to have them, their weeping is
manifest like exiles without countries,
tribes without names, struggling in
deserts not to become just another
pillar of salt, just another road marker
along the rutted highway into proverbial
valley of death, in that place where
all the bodies are buried, the ones
they put there and the ones they wished
they had.

These never scorned women,
beyond critiques of pure reason,
their followers irrational as escapees
from houses of detention, places of idol
worship, all of them demented,
all of them loyal as three-headed
guard dogs, mastiffs and mongrels.
These women who were the stuff
of legend, the stuff goddesses are
made of, their likenesses cast in stone
and thrust into hell where only the truly
regal reign supreme.

the death days

says that fucker camus

says the idea of ideas, and i
see what he means but i 
still believe in both words and the
silences between them

i still believe in love as something
more than some cynical
top 40 hit

and sid, who killed nancy,
or sid, who didn’t, but she’s dead either
way while the ghost of god endures

and were you drunk on the
night you pulled the trigger?

jesus

just give me a straight answer, okay?

spare me all of that
patti smith bullshit

spare me rimbaud & burroughs &
horses and all of 
that vacuous 1975 hipster crap

all of that self-righteous sanctity

what’s left at the end of each day
is a false king waiting to
rape your children

a ship filled with fire moving
slowly towards some new world

the death days, which we
always mistake for
the best times of our lives

Pop Poem from the Pew

The old widow in black mantilla
knelt from the black bench
near the altar and prayed the rosary.
Rumor has it she mourns
not her late husband
but the lover she had
before she married.
(Perhaps it was Rudolph Valentino.)

Her arthritic fingers, bead after bead.
Her melancholic eyes, teardrop after teardrop.
Her muttering mouth, drop after drop of blood.

When she finished her prayer,
she stood up and dropped the rosary,
shed a final fountain of tears,
drooled a gush of blood.
(The spot she left, you’d think
Jackson Pollock dropped by
and dripped his art.)

Now I don’t know her true story,
but I swear there was blood
on the church floor.
(And I heard Michael Jackson
sing his song.)

Eyes Stuck Open

My eyes are stuck open.
My eyes were blue.
My eyes are marbles now.
I look like a taxidermy,
This expression frozen on my face
Almost life-like.
My stuffed body behind the glass,
Hunched over the typer,
A glass half-filled with amber
At the side,
My hair a little wet and down into 
My face.

My eyes are stuck open.
My ears rest beneath my hair.
This museum is made of paper
And there is graffiti all along her walls.

Sometimes I am alone
But I always feel like someone is watching,
Even when the lights are dimmed,
The doors locked.

I see the people who come to gawk
In the silty air of day.
I hear what they say
But I cannot reply, argue,
Confess, agree
Or refute.
None of them know who I am
But many pretend
That they do
Because it is embarrassing to be ignorant
In a place of learning
Even though to learn
Is why they came.

My eyes are stuck open.
At least where my eyes
Used to be.

floozy

she was a heavy set
blonde with curves 
in all the right places
 
piercing eyes and a
tattoo on her left foot
 
as she told my mother
about her recent cardiac
event, i was undressing
her with my eyes and
wondering if her panties
were edible
 
i’m sure she noticed me
as our eyes met once
or twice
 
she was the kind of doctor
that probably has fucked
a patient or two
 
or maybe that’s just one
too many porn movies
i have been watching
lately
 
when we got back to 
the car my mother told 
me she didn’t like her
 
i chuckled and 
said i understand
 
mom said she looked 
like a floozy
 
i laughed
 
that was exactly 
why i liked her

Tears Of An Editor 

I rejected an aspiring poet today.
There’s a bad feeling in my stomach.

Maybe it was wrong to crush their dreams.
Then I burped and now it’s gone.

I’m oh so very remorseful about it. 
Time for the next one.

Fascination Hallucination

I open up 
spill out the sea 
with it all the lies  
and all the fake leads 
float in
sand castles flattened by heavy boots 
slide down as I erode 
under your fist 

I long to be crushed by something larger 
than a tidal wave of goodbyes 
and the flaccid vacancy of hellos 

We’ve succumbed to the Netflix gods 
they seduce us with their series upon series 
I’ve yet to feel anything 
even if it’s a pin prick 

When I feel something other than numbing delight 
I’ll be sure to call you in – 
to share this fascinating hallucination 
if it takes you over 
we can plug the holes of our treachery 
with our stubbed toes 
our tears 
and our ripped $2 bill 
each torn half tucked into our wallets
centuries ago
written in black marker on each: 
when all hell breaks loose 
tape here

Tuesday’s Child

Tuesday. 
I was going to kill my neighbor’s dog.
Somehow, I never got around to it
And it slipped into Wednesday
Thursday, I had lost the mood for it.
Friday, I couldn’t remember why
I wanted to do it in the first place.
The weekend was wonderfully
Wild and crazy, ups and downs,
One of the usual weekends for me.
Monday, I sunk back into normality.
Tuesday,
I was going to kill my neighbor’s dog.
Of course, I never got around to it.
That’s crazy, I’m due for a change.
Now Wednesday… by Wednesday,
I was back in the asylum by then

Hanging Out the Window

Still, in our underwear,
we yell, “Murderer!” 

at the man hanging out his window
– next building over from us,

as he knocks the pigeon nest 
off his brick window ledge.

Yet, we will support his store
in the morning when I buy 

my $1.50 24oz Budweisers, 
and you will comment 

on how the shelves have dust 
and the prices are almost at cost.