An envy plagues me
Turning color to grey
I’ve always enjoyed the glamour of celebrity
Or maybe I’ve been programmed that way
Will my Legacy remain
Once I float away
No one can see
No one sees me
I’m just a pixie pixel
Adjust the brightness & display
Like a ritual
I put my hands together
Look down at my phone screen
to pray
I would need the depths,
the immeasurable abysses:
the gaping holes, the bottomless faults,
the caves opened like mouths ready to suck.
They are regaled with the spurts,
they revel on the warm, fecund flows,
submerging the skins of the cheerful beasts,
on the disruptive, turbid rivers.
To hold back the currents in these gorges,
because drowning is forbidden.
Yet the flux goes beyond reason,
it takes away:
the leaves, the trees, the flowers,
the scarabs, the centipedes.
To brush the ground littered with corpses,
animals, undone, skinned, ripped.
A heap of rotten plants on which the slugs wallow.
Dubious surface, superficial am I,
the depths spit me back, vomit me,
no depth of thought,
I treat myself to no arpeggio.
I lay bare, bottomless, with nothing,
only white blood runs in my veins,
they empty slowly on the forehead
of a bitter and cancerous elf.
I’m covered in a silky orange
parachute like material. I yank
it free from me & realize I am
attached to an improvised roadside bomb.
I am studying a group of children
interacting in a school playground
I take discrete notes on how their behavior
differs from the gender norm.
I am talking to a lady with wooden legs
& as I saw one at the thigh I explain to her,
‘I need the firewood.’ I have cracked a large fat
The length of my leg. Folding back my foreskin
I find a plastic black monkey hunched forwards
grasping its ears. A truck beeps backwards to deliver
bales of hay about twenty feet high in neat stacks.
I purchase a .22 rifle to pick off rabbits and sheep in
the local park. A flock of fluffy & brightly ribboned
ewes stroll by. I am anxious to start firing but young children
on skateboards pass. A young thug thrashes a broken branch
against concrete. He spots me & figures I’m his next victim.
‘If you touch me, I’ll put you in the hospital for fifteen months’, I tell him.
He drops the tree. As I approach the automatic doors to a local shop
a glowing yellow tube about nine inches in length floats along the
ground & as it accelerates towards me I step on it and it vanishes.
Last night I confronted a baby lamb, its left eye a gleaming yellow
twice the size of its green right eye. Later, it was attacked & carried away
by a large hawk into a nesting tree. As the hawk plucked out the lamb’s eyes it shrieked like a baby. Blinded it wails hysterically, the hawk’s beak penetrating further into the lamb’s skull.
*
I attend another session with my psychologist, Ms Drew. I hand her my poem “Detox Dreams”
“I was wondering Ms Drew, if you tell me what this dream reveals about me.”
The old, damp Victorian houses
Seem to give off a smell of dark
Secrets. Of a casual, everyday
Evil.
Of an era when single girls
Who got pregnant were sent
Away, a dirty embarrassment.
An era of innocence and incest.
When the Church held an amount
Of power that’s almost inconceivable
Today. The evils that were committed
In the name of the Lord.
The abuse swept under the carpet,
but as we know anything swept under a carpet
Doesn’t just go away. It stays there, an
Unhealthy lump like a cyst or a tumor.
Then there are the murders that
Infect the air, the Black Panther hanging
Poor Lesley Whittall with a barbed wire noose,
Less than a mile from my house.
A mile in the other direction
There’s the taxi driver that was nearly
Decapitated driving down a lonely
Country lane at 3 am.
No one was ever arrested.
Yes Evil’s here and it’s thriving
Just like any place where there’s
A lot of people
And very little money.
Yes, evil is alive and well
And living in Stoke On Trent
And everywhere else
On this Earth.
Poetry is
an oily thing
that slips out
from pen or tongue.
It twists. It turns.
It makes everything
more or less or none.
The danger is
you’ll listen.
Rare chance that,
it’s true,
but words find
a way in,
and once inside
are very hard
to get rid of.
I don’t care what I’m re-enacting
By letting you
Stick your dick
Inside me
What psychodrama
I’m re-staging
Or maybe
Just rehearsing
For an hour yet to come
All that matters
Is what I see
And touch
And feel
Your cock
Huge
Hard
Godlike
And your hands
Pinning me down
Making me behave
Annihilating my will
I’m performing
Acting out
I don’t know what I’m up to
But I do know
That it’s not you
It’s me
Who has
The greater urge
Fuck me hard
As hard as you can
Drag me to the bottom
Put me in control
Of all my rapists
Detritus Of The Drunken Night,
by Ian Lewis Copestick
122 pages
Detritus Of The Drunken Night is the debut collection of outstanding poet, Ian Lewis Copestick. It is a book filled with gutwrenching epiphanies about the ups and downs of everyday life, written as only a true poet could pen.
“A man who’s drinking is always dreaming
about a man who’ll listen.”
Kamel Daoud, The Meursault Investigation
The men she hung with all had
the scent of failure, half-baked on
alcohol and self-defeat, simply
waiting for someone to turn up
the flame, someone like her, who
would gladly supply the match.
A few dates with her and they were
inextricably joined at the hip like
sick Siamese twins or hosts to
parasites, drunk driving home from
bars as if it were a new kind of
On-the-road full contact sport
anyone with a BAC of 2.0 and above
could play. Despite a diet of Budweiser
and red wine, she remained lean
and wiry, only slightly withered
around the edges where skin met
bone as if she’d been left out in the rain
too long and dried off in a gale force
wind. Sunbathing topless pictures
of her were conversation pieces
along the bar all the regulars
tired to fake enthusiasm for, though
mostly they could have cared less,
felt the snaps were meant more as
relationship auditions than titillation
knowing her current man was a bottle or
two short of being used up and returned
for recycling or for the deposit, if she
could get one. Some guys compared
her to a vampire in clogs who might last
for centuries or until someone drove
a stake through her heart for the good
of all mankind. it was likely that would
happen anytime soon but it should.
the suburban goth girl
with the blue hair
and purple eyeshadow
didn’t know you could refuse the side salad
so it sits there coagulating
under the hot lights
as the blonde at the table next to us
drunkenly shouts across the room to her pals
something about ruining her new shoes
from dropping some of her third drink on them
something about her husband’s birthday
and the president being close to god
she’s had three sexy ladies tonight
and if she doesn’t vomit
she says there might be room for a fourth
and
wink
wink
a special surprise for hubby when they get home
as everyone around her
laughs and laughs
doing the puritan end-of-the-work-week rage
and i wonder what a goth girl
with blue hair and purple eyeshadow
is doing in a hibachi restaurant
on a friday night
other than tilting the perfect picture
making things a tad askew
contributing another food waste in wasteful america
but this big, dumb colossus of stolen land
is full of surprises
and growing up in small cities
breeds a kind of useless rebellion
and plastic discontent
that can only be found at the mall
you can make mountains out of molehills
in the knowing light the chain store’s come-hither stare
i wonder what i’m doing here
hundreds of miles from home
anchoring the dead weight of citizenry
unnecessarily sober at a hibachi restaurant
stuck inside of buffalo, new york
with the brooklyn blues again
coming off a panic attack on the i-81
where i couldn’t breathe
and had to pull the car over to the side of the road
as idiot patriots with bumper sticker prophesies
zipped by me
going 90 in a 65
but across from me the hibachi chef
he knows my fate
he’s squirting sake into the mouths of babes
red faced business men
with their necks too fat for their oxfords
frat boys with their hats on backwards
greasing up their dates
for their own patriarchal surprise later
a sea of jaws undulating, filling up with all of that booze
spilling out of their mouths onto the table
because people can never get enough
of the free stuff
the chef asks me if i want a taste
i want to tell him that i think anxiety is just another word for america
i want to tell him that i’m thinking art is dead
how i’m ready to capitulate
move to the burbs
buy a car and complain about the traffic
hoist that fucking flag every morning
learn to live for the weekend
and how to love parades
each a hibachi dinner with my wife and good pals
each and every single friday night
buy the boss a christmas gift
and learn how to change a flat tire
burn all of my books
and walt whitman in effigy
at a neighborhood weenie roast
but i say no
and go back to my flat beer
keeping my flat opinions to myself
as he squirts some oil on the grill
and sets our world ablaze
with a flame that reaches almost to the roof
red and yellow and orange
tickling our fancy
we ooh and awe like cavemen in discovery’s first light
catching broccoli in our mouths
from an expert flip
huffing and huffing
at its heat
filming it all on our cell phones
as dead meat fries and sizzles
as sexy lady number four is presented to the table
to claps and chants
and soft debauchery
as the blonde woman screams and screams and screams
her useless constitution
and hubby knows
that
wink
wink
will just be her passing out again
as he circle jerks the witching hour
toggling between espn and fox news and internet porn
while back here on hibachi mother earth
a mountain of crystal white onion on the grill
burns like a tire fire
from a fizzled-out riot
in an abandoned strip mall
parking lot
of the mind
and to be perfectly honest with you
…i didn’t eat my goddamned side salad either
There’s a board on the pole for his feet
but the damned things are never still;
always running mid-air marathons.
He lost a shoe in the corn stalks,
kicked it off one day, I reckon.
He keeps the birds away, though,
his gnashing teeth and flailing limbs
far more effective than any man
stuffed with straw
Horror Sleaze Trash 