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

A Bullet Was Best

We thought she was off since
that time the shower ran and ran
and we came to find her
sitting propped up doll-like
a burnt down cig smoldering
on the edge of the sink

She’d shit in the shower
she was coherent
then somewhat later that year
her legs gave
they were well covered
as her track marks were

We didn’t notice her ankles
swollen like tree trunks
purpled to almost black
a vein burst into a firework
of mini blood clots
causing a stroke

In December she went missing
we found her sprawled out
on a door step
she was catatonic
wheelchair pushed to the curb
next to a garbage can
someone placed a bag
on the seat of it

We wheeled her
oozing
drooling
leaning
bag of a body home

We were happy with her
her wheelchair
her stamps that we used
to pay for milk and cereal
she couldn’t keep track
of them anyhow
and we were always so hungry
as long as she made it
home we were ok

June came
her veins so weak and polluted
she asked us to search
the back of her neck
we stared in sickened silence
yet she always found
a new vein
hidden
in the dry crevices
of her once lovely
curvy
bouncy
body

The following December
she went missing again
we searched frantically
it started to snow
endless velvety flakes
enormous and wondrous
walking in them felt magical
and surreal
the snow persisted
with heavy drifts

The teenager in the apartment
next door
found her wheelchair
near the steps that led
to the building’s rooftop

How in God’s name
did she ever manage to get up there
the effort she put into this

We still talk about it decades later
think always the same
a bullet was best

There’d been a loaded gun in the drawer
from some crazed boyfriend
who felt a single mother
with four kids
should have some kind of protection
we never went near it

Why she threw herself off the roof
to plummet five stories
and lay for 38 hours blanketed
under a glorious winter wonderland
when the bullet would have been
so much easier

 

Originally published in Anti-Heroin Chic

how can you be such a monster?

he spent four weeks
away from his family
in a rented apartment
somewhere on
the outskirts
of town

he told them that
he needed this
he was a writer
needed to focus on his work
conducting his research
undistracted

his little girl would call
from time to time
asking daddy to hold his
phone against his forehead
while she made a kissing sound
on the other line

very wholesome
except he lied about
holding the phone
against his forehead

“How can you be
such a monster?”
asked the naked prostitute
sitting on the edge of his bed

“Shut up,” he said
tossed his phone on the desk
and unbuckled

The Beauty & Obsession

It was the promise of fondling
a big pair of breasts that led me
to get arrested:
my father laughed his ass off
when I explained that she’d
given me an obviously
forged prescription to
present at the chemist
and that when I came
back with the goods, I’d
have ten minutes of
handling, sucking and
licking and caressing
and loving her lovely breasts:
he nodded, grinned and
then he said:
‘I would have done the
same’
we lifted our drinks:
‘To the beauty and the
obsession men
have with women’s
breasts’ he said:
we drank deep as his
wife looked on through
codeine smudged eyes,
shaking her head and
playfully cupping her
breasts as if
protecting them
like babies.

The Princess Builds a Castle

The tarot reader says
“You need to be the princess”

I build a castle.

The hot dog man says
“Do not fall in love today.”

I build a moat.

You tell me
“You are stunning.”

I put barb wire around the tower
to see how far you climb.

When you reach me
I throw out my thighs
to distract you from all
the pain.

I pray against your hips
to ask me to slow down.

As you sleep,
I crawl out of bed to
ask the corner store clerk
“How to love again?”

He stares at me blankly
and hands me my cigarettes.

When you and I smoke them
I can’t brake my tongue
long enough for you
to catch your breath
to ask about my castle.

You left exhausted.
I’ve been exhausted.