Hang In There, by John D Robinson
126 pages
Uncollected Press

Me and Sal Paradise, by Charles Rammelkamp
56 pages
FutureCycle Press

Ah, youth! Charles Rammelkamp’s ME AND SAL PARADISE is a poetic tale of the hitchhiking adventures of a young man in his early twenties. It’s the early 1970s, when Jack Kerouac’s influenced America’s youth with his romantic tales of cross-country adventures by car. One sequence of poems illuminates a 1971 hitchhiking adventure from the Midwest to Montreal and back, a pair of friends crossing Canada and New York state. Another sequence relates the solo adventures the following summer, also originating in the Midwest, of the author who this time heads to San Francisco, where his twin brother is living in the famed Haight-Asbury district. Through these journeys, we contemplate with the narrator the meanings of youth, friendship, and inevitably personal destiny.

PREVIEW/PURCHASE HERE

The Nature of Flings

As god is my witness
I’ve never been
with anyone
with a body
as hot as yours,
though several came close.
Too bad we will soon
hate each other.
That’s part of the equation,
the balance to all this
love we’re making.
Hate. It grows slow at first,
but grow it does
until it can walk across the room
and pour itself a drink.

And Dim the Lights

You’ll be a lot less disappointed
if you approach life
like an internet hookup:

Go.  Leave the house.
Drive to the motel.
Knock on the door.

Just don’t expect her
to look too much
like her photos.

Give her your best hump.
Don’t let her see
the disappointment
on your face.

Too Sexy For Instagram

I am very shy when it comes to giving women compliments
when i perceive them to be beautiful and intellectually fit and tolerant of my jokes
this one girl posed in fishnet stockings and I felt guilty for admiring her shapely figure
and the relentless buzz of sensuality I got imagining my hands as they caressed
her shapely pins while she crossed them to adjust one of her high heels
panties bright, lace, satin and she was generous enough to show them off
along with a wonder bra made by God himself during a horny episode of one stormy titan clash
of course i want her, but she’s taken so i shyly admit that I’m nervous when
I clumsily compliment her divine figure and just how sexy glasses are
when paired with the right lingerie, and girls like that are rare fish in a sea
that these days leaves little to the imagination, but her foxy thighs dream beauty for you
and you are respectful of her but WOW some lucky man out there gets to go to bed with her,
reading a cutting edge poetry zine and gently massaging her dangerous curves
until you are a dead man, a legend who died making love to a great and powerful muse
who gives me a tingle deep down at the center of it all by fogging up my glasses
in the heat of a computer screen surrounded by poetry, her mind an epic poem
that she teases me with just how much milk she drank to do that fine body good.

Fist Fighting and Fornication
21 pages
Holy&intoxicated Publications

Holy&intoxicated Publications is thrilled to be publishing “Fist Fighting and Fornication”, the latest from David Boski. This book publishes June 21st and can be preordered through johndrobinson@yahoo.co.uk or boski.david.boski@gmail.com.

$5:00/£5:00

The Angel of Love,
In Her Mercy,
Plays in the Dirt

God is love – what love and
which god/dess are negotiable.

The eyes are the windows
to the crotch, and yours say
puppy wants a collar.

Oops – correction: they say busted, guilty
puppy wants a collar.

Yeah-huh, chickenshit –
I’m the fuck police
and I know where you live.
I’ve got a box of crucifixion nails
and a slow hammer
with your name on it, boy,
and if I have to sweat you all night
you’ll spill every sick, submissive thing
your self-disgusted heart desires,
and I won’t give a fuck
until you’re a hopeless mess
of tears, and snot, and shame;

perv.

Then I’ll tenderly clean your face,
kiss your forehead,
and Holy Fuck your filthy brains out;

and such is the power of My grace
that when you come, you’ll come clean –

innocent and shameless,
crying in My arms.

Jezebel / Jellyroll

“Jezebel was the talk of the town,”
a vulgar playground chant began,
one of a string of dirty jokes
adolescents snickered about to each other.

We all knew who Jezebel was –
or thought we did –
some kind of lurid Biblical whore
who seduced men and killed them
when she’d finished with them –
still insatiable after a dozen.

You can see how that would enflame
the pubescent imaginations of teenage boys.

King Ahab’s wife in the Old Testament,
her crime killing God’s prophets,
supporting false gods.
Flamboyant in makeup, jewelry and a wig,
she was defenestrated by her servants,
her corpse trampled by horses.

At the same time
we learned the word “jellyroll”
from 1930’s “negro blues” songs.
I ain’t gonna give you none of my jellyroll.

Something sweet and sticky:
metaphors just out of reach to kids that age.

 

Hermaphroditus

Incomparable! Two lovers in one
Inseparable in his/her unity
Together we three become one
A blasphemous parody of love and desire
Yet more satisfying than the usual fare
Hermaphroditus, my only desire
Mythic master-mistress of passion
A conception rare and strange

John Sprockett Buys a Mount for Sylvia Williams:
September, 1863

We’ve ridden one tired mount through Kansas,
Miz Williams escaping the bullwhips
of that Arkansas plantation, to make her fortune
cooking for gold rats in the Colorado fields,
me hiding from the devilment I seem to raise
like Prospero conjuring spirits, to run trap lines
in the high, desolate mountains.

We stop at a town’s livery stable, the owner,
shotgun to hand, staring at my bear-slashed face,
knowing me for one of Quantrill’s men that massacred
Lawrence, before my conscience mauled me
like the bear that clawed me into a monster.

“I know who you are,” his voice shakes. “Keep riding.”

“First, this fine lady needs a mount.” I see him
weighing if he can refuse on account of her color,
or maybe put one over on us, when she points
to a strawberry roan mare.

“Ain’t for sale,” he spits tobacco. I let him take
a good long look at the scars that talon my face,
and for him to understand we ain’t moving
without that mare and her smooth stepping lines.

I toss a coin and demand a bill of sale.
Miz Williams sits her like a Comanche
born to ride without a saddle.

“I’ll call her Miz Shakespeare,” she laughs,
“for all the poems you been teaching me.”
For the first time in as long as I can recall,
a smile warms my face like daybreak,
like that summer day the Bard wrote about.