Ozone

The wind tickles leaves without moving them and
Your clothes cling cool and damp to your skin and
You’re still too warm for comfort and
All the trees on this block seem unfamiliar and
Your shoes scrape rough against smooth concrete and
You’re sure you’re not on the right block and
You scan the clouds to see if the moon bleeds through and
You try to glimpse lightning rods on deserted roofs and
That song you don’t know just won’t leave your ear alone and
Someone disappears around that corner just ahead and
You’re sure you know her but she never wore that dress and
A week old newspaper clutches at your ankles and
The air smells like a lake you remember but have never seen and
A bus hisses by red and orange in the darkness and
You only want to reach your home safely and
Fall to your knees to pray for rain to pray for an end

Colonoscopy of God

Oh, my lover,
Vertical cosmos of salacious flesh!
Foetal Adam writhing in
The curves of your thighs,
Chants of distaste;
Fragments of apple
Dressed in maggot vein.
The heart of your desire unchaste!
The seeds that you’ve planted
In our mother I despise,
Vermin gnawing at the thesis of faith
But despite the deafening cries
And the butchery of Cain
We can all pray in this
Wound of fallacy.
We’re the colonoscopy of God –
The anatomy of a bad idea.

Breathers and Breakers

Can we just stop talking about trade tariffs
sex scandals
diseases and typhoons?

the world will repair itself
one plastic water bottle at a time
we are a species (I think)
a clan
that sat under the moon a billion years ago
in mad wonder
now we pack pistols and blades

I saw a woman lying
on the ground
in the subway staircase
she wore a hospital ID bracelet
she had grey sweatpants
with blood caked and muddied at her crotch
I knelt down to touch her
to see if she was alive

I wanted to ask the wretch what happened to her
how did she ever get
here

she felt my hand
and lifted one glazed eye
she drooled in anger
snarled
and mouthed fuck off

I stepped back
and thought
this was once someone’s child
that was carried in a belly
maybe she was loved dearly
or not at all

all the gray whales are dying
their carcasses wash up on the shores
of Oregon and California
scientists huddle together on the beaches
to autopsy their plethoric bodies
to understand
find a way
to save
preserve….

the human body is an uncanny mystery
I can barely roll out of bed in the morning
half a dead whale inside this skin
a lazy eye
dead mind

this wretch got out of a hospital bed
blood oozing from the sacred place
of her once ripe body
to lay full out on a dirty subway
cement ground
people scurried about
not one person gave a shit

all I want to understand is
where all the recycled garbage goes
and if that
is what’s killing our gray whales
these days

Horror Sleaze Trash proudly presents 10 years of Horror Sleaze Trash!

A collection of poems by Melbourne-based writer, Ben John Smith, ranging from the depths of horror to the boundaries of sleaze and the absolute bottom of trash.

BUY A COPY or DOWNLOAD HERE

 

Seven Ways of Looking at Toilet Paper

1. Bleached white and insubstantial as the word of an ex-lover. Rip it in squares, swab your private parts, examine the paper’s surface, toss it into the swirl. Repeat as often as necessary. The bathroom is your laboratory. Sometimes two or three squares will do, other times it takes 10 or even 12. Much depends on your solid food intake. Do the math.

2. If you go to Morocco, don’t expect toilet paper as a matter of course. You stupid fucking tourist. Next you’ll be wanting a throne for your pampered American ass. Purchase a roll at the market and carry it around in your backpack or purse. It won’t be Charmin, you pompous WASP. Moroccan tp is grey and scratchy as an elderly wino’s three-day-old beard. Shut up and be sure to buy several rugs before you fly home.

3. The 2004 Portland Rose Festival had a Charmin trailer with posh bathrooms. People stood in line, waiting for the chance to excrete waste. They looked bored. At the doorway, uniformed attendants handed rolls of toilet paper to everyone. “Welcome to the Charmin building!” they sang. “Enjoy yourself!” Inside the bathrooms, happy music played while cartoon videos of dancing animals flickered onscreen. A devious and effective ploy to win over potential customers to the wonders of quilted Charmin.

4. Your goddamned roommate didn’t position the new roll properly. Everyone knows the end is supposed to go over, not under. Defection from this rule is grounds for homicide in some states. “Your honor, I tried to warn him, but he wouldn’t listen.” You hated your roommate—his taste in music, the disgusting way he got food all over his teeth while chewing. Good riddance.

5. Coffee filters work in a pinch. A friend of mine taught me this back in the 90s. A few weeks later, she became homeless. I always wondered whether there was a connection.

6. There’s a toilet paper shortage. Folks fear they’ll reach into their cupboards and find them barren of tissue, so they’re buying entire pallets of toilet paper. Housewives laugh maniacally as they drive away from Walmart, fresh rolls secured with bungee cords into their overflowing SUV trunks. How could we have let this happen? Is this who we are as a nation?

7. I go to bed and dream of toilet paper. The dream is like the Charmin trailer, only with better music. At first, the rolls are soft and soothing as clouds. Then they begin to multiply like the brooms in “Sorcerer’s Apprentice.” As soon as I grab one and put it in my cabinet, six more appear. The music speeds up and becomes increasingly sinister. Everything is out of control. I wake up in a cold sweat. Thank God it was just a dream. But morning is months away.

Icarus Machine

Lustful creatures in tumor heavy skies. Castle weary air heavy to wear. It is all we are known for in these pacific currents, pooling like death around and around the valleys and veins of uprooted nuance. Be it the mistress in cold blood of all the lizard dogs that slither her carcass. Mutinied, they pleasure paralyzing paradise with wispy caress to annihilate the god of human.

Shapeshifting shiners blur the cheekbones to once more color the stratosphere a new shade of black. The icarus machine knows not how to fall forever, but bares the scars of what it takes to burn infinitely. Like a chameleonic actress harking to thieves should they steal her soul, turns blue of wretchedness, and wrings the temper from the forehead of damned intrusion.

Falsifiers unclothe the deathbed paramount and we become moths to flame before the disheveled lair of Carthage. No better are we if we rapture the carnal sin of youthful wanting, than lustful creatures who are now as feverish as a carcass in cold blood.

Moaning earth, ejaculate the lure.

The Alphabet Advice

Now, after 4 decades
I cannot remember
his name but
I remember some
advice he offered:

‘When you go down
on your woman,
write the alphabet
with your tongue and
by the time you
get to ‘M’
she’ll be satisfied
no bullshit’

He was right,
and I’ve kept
to this advice
ever since,
never reaching
beyond the letter J.

One of Many Vices

I quit smoking pot.
For twelve years I rolled
a few joints a day.

I fantasized about endless motivation,
of cleanliness and doing dishes
right after I was done with them.

I imagined getting right on the job hunt,
and not eating pizza in bed, no way
could a man unstoned watch nine hours
of the Simpsons in a day.

It turns out I can,
and pot wasn’t the problem,
it was just me.

Mexican Beer

You know nothing matters
But you, the muse who comes and goes leaving me
Thinking about your song & dance performances.
The way your voice quavered
Above the sidewalk sounds,
Or how your fashionably booted feet drummed
Footsteps of doom in my jaded being.
You are the Shade time can’t erase,
The karma chameleon who assumes
Whatever guise or form necessary
To affect me in some way.
At the supermarket as we shopped
The tacky cashier-bitch who totaled-up our groceries
Kept calling me Doll Baby; you didn’t care,
Though her patronizing pissed me off.
Then when we got to my apartment
To drink bad beer I asked you to sing
Like Madonna, to swirl about
In your sexy new Victoria’s Secret outfit
That cost too much, but you insisted
It made you stand out from the crowd.
I asked you to dance and go down on me
& you did all that, your blonde hair
Uncurling with sweat & your body
Swaying through a painful territory,

But Madonna wasn’t there.
Or any Victoria’s Secret model.
Only that damn outfit scattered
In colorful disarray, its thong
A purple-spotted rag
Tied around your throat
So the muse would never
Live to tell.

Eventually you fooled me again, coming
Back to say, “You know nothing really matters,”
Ghost-like,
Wondering where the worm was
At the bottom of the tequila bottle
I couldn’t believe
One of us had killed
The other – with love
(or love    hate    perverted)

 

From: The Underground Movie Poems

Evil is on the loose my friend

The world is on fire dear
come sit next to me and let’s
watch it burn
have no sympathy
we can at least
walk through flames
let the fire
scorch our soles
we deserve this burning baptism

lament over our sins
dredge up our treachery
as they roll out the war
in a stampede of hate

I want us to hole in
save food and water
build a bunker
there’s this noose
that attached itself to my neck
at birth
in case of emergency pull
this ripcord
straight to hell

who’s judging anyhow?
martyrs and militias
wrecking groups
the hostiles
the sign above our door says
‘Doom is in the bedroom’
a malingerer
sucks every breath

you don’t know about this do you?
run down the street in droves
I am afraid
not for me ever
but for my children
because when I nestled them
in my nook
and thanked God every day
for their little lives
I did not foresee
humanity unraveling
us back into the dark ages
as if every life does not matter
as if original sin could only affect
certain souls

but honey I tell you
there’s a pyre and I want to run
straight into it
if it would save my children
from this
I would gladly burn myself
to ash