Kevin

Kevin has a slightly inflamed liver
From drinking so much
He’s suffered from agoraphobia
And the alcohol takes away his fears
The flat where he lived
Became uninhabitable
And he was threatened
By some local gypsy
That if he didn’t get him any Valium
He’d cut his arms and legs off
Kevin knows a bit about dismembered legs
Nine years in the army
His best friend got his leg blown off
During friendly fire
While he was training up in Royston
He had to pick up his best friend’s leg
He said and take it to the doctors
But they said there was nothing they could do
Kevin has Lucy tattooed on his left hand
And doesn’t want to talk about the army much
He’d fought in the First Gulf War
But he said nothing much happened there

Ardleigh Ward,
The Lakes Mental Health Centre,
Colchester, February 2011

Failing Forward

in high school
he repeatedly told her
that he was saving
himself for marriage

and eventually
she left him alone
but after graduation
she approached him
yet again

and this time he told her
that he was focusing on
his career as a writer

they both had their dreams
and they kept dreaming and
fighting to accomplish them,
insisting and getting up
from every defeat

failing forward
as some would say

It took decades but
eventually both of their
dreams came true

they were married
and he still hadn’t struck a deal
with any publisher but
made a relatively okay
income self-publishing

he wrote for a very narrow niche
very trashy erotic fiction
and his lovely wife helped him
with inspiration and research

“C’mon,” he urged her,
“moan a bit harder,
cry some too.”

she did as she was told
as he went around her
with the camera

it was hard work but
at least the German Shepard
fucking her from behind
had fun

The Dead Know

Death goes unnoticed the day
your blood seeps out of
your virginity cup, the day
you lie, eagle-spread, younger
than spring, forgetting funerals
and peers and if your Momma
could just see your hips swinging, hair wet
and your face a shiny gloss like
the shellac on rosewood,
she would lift up,
dried bones and all,
to rip you out from under him.

But graves don’t talk
and the dead never
come back to mourn themselves.
If your Momma could have
scrawled one message with
grainy hands
would it have been
to save yourself—like
she did?

The Taylor

I once thought I was in love with a whore
she was married and fed me lies
tales of a separation and divorce
I was a slave to the cunt
a slave to that cunt
many times stuck by the phone
waiting on her call
only to be let down
defeated
demasculinized
a beefcake turned into a cupcake
without a ringing call
this time was to be different
we set up a meeting at the Taylor Motel
a lowlife
low down motel
low on the totem pole of said establishments
I had a few pre-rolls of weed ready
and picked up a twelve pack of some kind of beer
she said she’d call at ten
I got to the Taylor at nine
ready to get the fuckfeast started
I got the key
parked
and headed toward the room
just before I reached the door
an old
white
wrinkled crackhead
with glasses and no bra
asked if I needed help with the beer
I politely told her no
that I was waiting on someone
as I entered into the disheveled fuck shack
I cracked open a few cans in preparation
and waited
and waited
and waited
that fucking bitch
that fucking bitch did it again
and then I regretted not sharing my beer
with the braless
four-eyed
crackwhore

Funeral Home Art Space

To our way of thinking,
a dead body is a canvas,
and I am an artist,
replacing blank expression
with, my mood for the day,
coloring the cheeks purple
if that’s how my palette desires it,
and the lips,
the brightest shade of gold.
Some family members
are shocked at the result.
That’s no different
from every other great art movement
from Impressionism to Dada.
One of my partners is a sculptor.
He’s been known
to transpose the eyes and the mouth
if that’s what his muse demanded.
Another is more of a gourmet.
His recipes are such
that even I draw the line.

Watching the Pigeons Fuck

Monmartre
We were to meet in the square
Share a drink, two wayward poets
Words a pony ride to the stars

She a mover and shaker on the big top scene
We’d barely ordered our café’s
She hit the
‘Every stroke of bad luck I’ve ever had’

I hung in there cursing my yawns and groans
The story grew legs, tired bones, achy saddles
My eyes drifted

An ephiphany
I saw it
On a balcony across the rue
Bright as the blue day
Two pigeons fucking like
Humping train lanes, pigeon style
A mile a minute
Slipping her the big carrier..
And after awhile

I returned with a ventiloquist’s smile
Didn’t want to miss the bad news crescendo

On a deep blue sea without a raft
She continued the rattle
For minutes or years

She has so much to give the world
So much of me, she says, and then there’s me
And me too

The pigeons fornicated mightily
Beethoven’s 9th
The whole thing came to a roaring climax
Saved by the bill

UNA VIDA PER LUCIO FULCI

I suspect Fulci knew that zombies are metaphors,
that we are always running from death
and the fear that we might live forever

like Tropicália bitches who marionette
down the beach, weeping maggots from their brows.
He could see that hunger is hate in its strongest

form and that we have come to worship it.
This we know: we eat of the flesh, raise the dead,
idolize agony, and open the gates of hell every time.

A priest murders a child or hangs himself
or blesses a Duke who rapes his own daughter and
the next thing you know the dead are walking the earth.

And always watching, little Lucio at his camera, feet
swollen with diabetes, fingers twisting the zoom
to black beads of rosary blood, to eyes when they’re

screaming, making a dialectic of consumption.
As blood soaks a scaffold, he watches, as a woman turns
inside out, he watches, vowing never to look away

or flinch. He watches as a raped little girl
is betrayed by men in power and he shows us
images to release the savage under the skin

with blood, blood, so much blood the lens drips
scarlet Lucio, crimson Lucio, red Lucio.
Like a troubadour all he could do was tell stories

of women, his Beatrice, trapped by corrupt hands
and devoured by creatures with unspeakable hungers,
women he could never touch or save but only bear

witness, only make symbols of resistance.
He sacrificed an eye to his vision
a splinter piercing the last taboo, that last

less than sacred piece of flesh, no cutaway
from the image, because the dead always take our eyes
which I suspect he knew is a metaphor.

few posessions and no doubts

he owned one pair of shoes
four pairs of socks
one pair of pants
a tank top
two t-shirts and
a sweatshirt

he’d lost the cap
in his last dice game.

“well, hell, doesn’t matter,
broke the spell,” he chanted,
“therefore
somehow, someway
luck is gonna come my way
and why not here, now, today?”

the dreams haven’t left
the dreams were still in him,
in his soul
ready to explode

47 manuscripts:
14 novels, 7 novellas,
and 26 short stories
he carried in his pack
along with his socks
his other t-shirt
a knife
six pens he stole
from the library
where he wrote
a candy bar
and an old dull razor

he wasn’t so young anymore
the beard and gray hairs
made him look much older
surely the hunger had
affected that as well

but it didn’t matter
he was going to make it
one day, some day
soon

somehow, someway

he really had no
doubt about it

Part of History

I have always known the word ‘cock’
as a term referring to the penis…or
member, pecker, schlong,
prick, phallus, peter, dick,
shaft, tool, johnson, willy,
stick, wood, dong, meat,
weiner, boner, rod, wang,
peen, ween, tallywacker, jimmy,
skin flute, organ, and private part
etcetera
I have never known the word ‘cock’
to be a reference for vagina
until today
listening to an old school hip hop song
I heard 2 Live Crew sing the following
“What you like fellas?
head, booty, and cock”
COCK?
did I hear that correct?
then I heard it again
there was no mistaking
they in fact did say cock
this sent me on a several hour
google research mission
I found evidence of numerous artists
from the 80’s and 90’s
using the word cock to refer to
female genitalia
I was absolutely shocked
some of these songs
I have heard more than a few times
obviously I just glossed over
the mention of cock or didn’t pick up on it
I dug in deeper with my research
pulling up forum after forum
where this exact issue was discussed
a little history lesson was learned
it seems that since the 17th century
the word cock referred to the male genitalia
then sometime between 1920 and 1940
cock became an African-American slang word for vagina
possibly derived from cockles
a cock opener was a penis
the dictionary of American Regional English states
‘at a point roughly the same as the
Mason-Dixon Line, there is a division in meaning
to the North cock refers to male genitals,
but in the South its use is restricted to
the female genitals
Missouri is a border state in which
both meanings are used’
I guess that explains why Missouri
is the ‘show me’ state
you know…just to be sure