Frozen Milk

I never understood the term
colder than a witch’s tit
I’ve known a few witches
in my day and all of their
breasts were a perfectly
normal and pleasant
ninety-eight degrees
give or take
just don’t ask me how
I know the temperature
of a well-digger’s ass

Pussy Whipped

“If she’d given him a shit sandwich,
he’d have asked her
for a chaser of piss,”
Claudette McCoy sighed,
taking a deep drag from her Pall Mall.
The smoke dribbled from her nostrils
as from a pair of hookah hoses.

She sat across the kitchen table
from her husband, Ron,
lamenting her teenage son’s broken heart.
He’d just been dumped
by a girl who considered herself
too good for him.
Amber had moved on
to a more ambitious boy.

Claudette tried not to feel contempt
for her son, having pegged Amber
a climber the moment she met her.

“I felt the same way about you,”
Ron commented, “when we started dating.”
It made Claudette smile.
Her husband always knew
the right thing to say.

attrition

four in the morning
listening to tori amos

remembering all those
years ago, when forever
seemed possible

and then you remember
that those bright days
were reserved for
someone better
than you

you wasted your talents
so, you have to survive
on scraps

enjoy the taste of shit
and failure and debt

embrace a future that
has no rewards

no romantic lead in
some movie that you
always wanted to write

chase down the needle

the train

the last bus to ever
leave this hell

attrition is the slowest
death you could ever
imagine

Dance of Tears, Chief Nobody

I’m old Indian chief story
plastered on white scattered sheets,
Caucasian paper blowing in yesterday’s winds.

I feel white man’s presence
in my blindness−
cross over my ego my borders
urinates over my pride, my boundaries−
I cooperated with him until
death, my blindness.

I’m Blackfoot proud, mountain Chief.

I roam southern Alberta,
toenails stretch to Montana,
born on Old Man River−
prairie horse’s leftover
buffalo meat in my dreams.
Eighty-seven I lived in a cardboard shack.
My native dress lost, autistic babbling.
I pile up worthless treaties, paper burn white man.

Now 94, I prepare myself an ancient pilgrimage,
back to papoose, landscapes turned over.

I walk through this death baby steps,
no rush, no fire, nor wind, hair tangled−
earth possessions strapped to my back rawhide−
sun going down, moon going up,
witch hour moonlight.

I’m old man slow dying, Chief nobody.

An empty bottle of fire-water whiskey
lies on homespun rug,
cut excess from life,
partially smoked homemade cigar-
barely burning,
that dance of tears.

I, Penis

I, Penis,
inherit the Earth.
The meek, not so much.
meek penises are worms
crushed by pusillanimous ambitions,
ambitions too polite
and sensitive. Pardon me,
proclaims polite, pussy penis.

I, Penis,
sound barbaric yawps over the rooftops
of my trousers, the beret my master
wears concealing bald exposure.
commercials and shows offer advice,
take what you need

I trample the bathrooms, the poetry texts, history
I, Penis. I, Penis. A title imperial and full of verve,
insert my ice-cream cone tip into the metaphors
and similes and
visual erasures
erase this.

misbehaved ladies may make history,
but to the penis go the spoils.
Soli Penis Gloria, proclaim the priests
in their collars. for the glory alone
of, I Penis.

problematic, proclaim the snowflakes,
with lyrical predictability,
paradigms, binaries
all these are foreign,
to I, Penis,
I trample, and my head marches
on and on, for the glory

of I, Penis.
don’t stop me now, for there is but one opinion,
I, Penis. There is only the I,
emboldened by the fact that
I am penis.
I, Penis.

Sleep on it

If you should love me in your sleep
It would be a fruitful dream.
And I asleep shall in turn
writhe and sweat and think
who this night came for
and with whom it stayed,
and who found joy this evening
and who found pain
when these ghosts of what we lived
came visiting.

fieldwork

It’s happened
yet again.

Another educator arrested.

This time,
a high school teacher getting it on
with her 16-year-old student.

Many of the liaisons
took place in her car—

In her defense,
she was a biology teacher.

Book learning is great
but there’s just no substitute
for real world experience.

at the top of their lungs

searching for nirvana
between the thighs
of a lovely woman
in rome

i want to believe in
love, the future, a
destiny deserving
of all this pain

but i’ve choked on
my disillusionment
since i was a child

one night it’s
the bottle

the next night it’s
a butcher’s knife
thrown across
the room

there isn’t any love
in the room if someone
isn’t screaming at
the top of their lungs

i’m still searching
for nirvana

soft skin on a
sunny beach

worries swept away
with the tide

not all sins can be
washed with blood
or simply brushed
under the last dirty
rug in the house

Bring out your dead

There are some consolations in a plague year.
You’ve a polite excuse,
to duck unwelcome social invitations
to skip the banal drudgery
of self-opinionated company
of overbearing liberals
and pontificating radicals.

You’ve good reason to dodge
the intellectually occluded
and the patently deluded,
the would-be salon-keepers
and the throne-lickers and creepers,
the dipsomaniac ravers
and the posturing face-savers,
obsessive Trump-haters
and embittered second-raters,

the unregenerate hipsters,
and fatcat investors
narcissistic exhibitionists,
the wannabees and ego trips,
the drama’s failed protagonists,
all constipated scribblers and
football-obsessed dribblers,
those whom vanity disposes
and hypocrisy discloses
with each fatuous
pronouncement from their lips.

With all that said, bring out your dead.

It surely is a tonic to escape
these dull discourses.
What’s not to like
about a plague, apart
from quarantine and panic,
food shortages and corpses?