Reunion

He says it’s so good to see me.
He jokes and asks if I’ve gotten shorter.
He frets over saying something else clever but
as I remember, that’s as good as it gets.
He says he’s married now
(though he’s not wearing a ring).
He notices me noticing but I don’t ask about it.
He asks if I have time to get a drink.
I squint and look at my watch.
Fuck, I’m a poet. I don’t wear a watch.
I bite my lip. My heart beats fast.
I scratch my head and look confused
(it’s the one emotion I can fake).
I say,
‘What was your name again?’

Alaska

He invites you up to Alaska.

You spend the week
wishing he didn’t have a mullet
and bending over so he can
fuck your ass.

When you get home you
wish you had stayed.

He stops calling and answering your e-mails.
You try to forget him.
Your husband fucks your ass
but it isn’t the same.

I Bought Oedipus a Drink

‘You ever
dream of
fucking your own
mother?’
he
asked me

‘That’s sick,’
I told
him

‘You haven’t
seen my
mother,’
he
explained

Relationship Calculus

I met her at a party,
chatting casually over cocktails,
trudging through the strain
of strangers sharing the same space
by cycling through canned questions:
Where are you from?
What do you do?
I see her face flinch
when I tell her I teach poetry.
I see the sympathy seeping
from her eyes
as the remnants of the tenuous connection
that was forming dies.

I always preferred math
She explains, curtly.
The way the numbers lined up
in neat rows to march to
rigidly right answers.

Oh God, I want to scream,
believe me, I know!
Calculations are incredibly comforting,
like a blanket of confidence
blocking out cold confusion.
And if it weren’t such an intrusion,
I would ask her to tell me:
if I add up all of my mistakes–
every neglectful night you spent alone
with me by your side,
every compliment I never gave,
every ignored plea for attention,
every game we never played–
and I subtract every misstep you made,
could she calculate who was to blame
for this mangled marriage?

If I had known her for a fraction
longer than this five-minute farce,
I would have asked her to figure for me:
exactly how many three-hour arguments
raised to the power of cunt
= leave
and how many hot meals,
small favors,
and belly laughs
from inside jokes
only you understand
= stay

If I didn’t notice her eyes
seeing everything but me,
her mind searching for
the just-right reason to leave,
I would have asked her:
How many months of
you-not-leaving-the-couch
should I add
to those degrading diatribes
you dutifully deliver
enumerating my every
deficiency, before I
have to factor in
keeping-the-family-together?

As she slipped away from
the conversation
we weren’t even having,
I begged the back of her head
to just tell me:
If, as you say,
I took someone precious
and broke them–
not out of malice,
but because my young heart
was careless–
how long should I spend
cleaning up my mess?

Believe me, I want to tell
every engineer who side-eyes
the e.e. cummings I idolize,
I would trade every poem on Earth
for the ability to solve for why.

A burned past

Walking through my old neighbourhood
I arrive at the house I grew up in,

there are two cars in the driveway
the windows of the house are smashed out

by the fire which is erupting inside.
The curtains are burning with such violence

The front door is bricked in.
smoke is bellowing out of the windows

I see my mother trying to escape the flames
her hair is on fire, her skin black and scolded.

My stepfather just standing there with a gun to his head
continually mocking me with taunts and abuse.

The dog has been hung by its neck in the lounge room
with a tag that says “to Craig, I’m Max”

The front yard is full of dead grass
with children’s bones scattered throughout.

My Stepfather points the gun and has me in his sight
fires hatred into my chest.

In the trees are the hanging corpses of my ancestors
swaying from side to side

and spirits are mourning at their feet crying out to a dead god
to save me, to shelter me

from the burning house on a grave of childhood bones.

The house is the only thing left standing
while everything else has turned to rubble,

the streetlights sag

and the bicycles we rode around on
lay rusted and tormented with age

I turn away and I walk forward
through this desolated street

a familiar unchanged geography
of where I am from

once again I am standing
out the front of the house I grew up in.

Art is Vulgar/Vulgar is Art

09:35 AM sitting on
a bench in the plaza –
I watch as the beast
is dragged away
on its chain leaving
behind a brown trail –
before an unsuspecting
woman in office attire
skewers part of the turd
like a dog shit croquette
through the heel
of her shoe –
as an equally oblivious
man shouting down his
phone paints part
of his white Air Force 1’s
a fresh shade
of brown –
as the homeless man
now sat next to me gulps
his morning Sangria,
laughing at the scene
and society
and
it’s a disgusting scene
at that –
but it is, what it is
and as they say
you can’t polish a turd –
but under
the right light,
at the right time
you might just
get a poem
out of it

Dinosaurs Too

you used to download porn on LimeWire
using a dial up internet connection,
watch wrestling when the WWE was still the WWF,
use a Zenith VCR to record movies
off of your gigantic television set,
own a Walkman and after that a Discman;
there are kids out there who have forgotten more
about technology than you have ever known,
you get tired for no reason,
your hangovers are much worse now,
it takes you longer to piss,
and you have grey’s in your pubic hair;
you can’t get up without having a cup of coffee
or two or three,
sometimes your back hurts
and
according to WebMD
you’re completely fucked;
plus,
you’re old enough to be
a father —
to a teenager,
and one time a woman
at a bar replied
‘wow that’s old’
after you told her your age
but that’s ok;
cause one day
she’ll be a fucking
dinosaur
too.

Thoughts and Prayers

My stepfather got a postcard
from the 700 Club
a month after his suicide.

The televangelist urged everyone
to call a toll-free number
for prayer healing and
a free “Jesus First” pin.

He claimed to have a powerful
and intricate communication system:
gunmetal cables, shooting prayers
towards the almighty at speeds
faster than sound or light.

My stepfather lived in rural Illinois,
a place where prayer was
common as pie. He drove twenty miles
to buy beer in the next county, free
from the Church’s vigilant eye:

drank his liver to flames,
body slumped against the couch.
His strap always near, ready
for punishment. The beating
worse if you flinched.

My stepfather didn’t believe
in guns. He chose fire instead,
a dress rehearsal for the Afterlife.

One morning at sunrise, he
doused himself with lighter fluid,
lit the match. His hair burst
into flames. The twilight sky
radiated with furious burning.

My stepfather got a postcard
from the 700 Club
a month after his suicide
and his widow turned it over
and over in her hands, wondered

where the hell the pin was.

the broken stripper

the dim lights couldn’t conceal
the fact the next stripper
mounting the buffet-sized stage
wore bicycle shorts
rather than a g-string
and a torso-obscuring blouse
instead of pasties

she possessed the
anatomical features of a watermelon
with spat seed eyes
and a smile like
a chewed green rind

she wobbled on the stage
occasionally
brushing against the pole
the duration of the song
swaying without rhythm
without removing any clothing
ignoring the eviscerating laughter

“hey manager!” my buddy hollered
“come quick!
our stripper’s broken!”

her dark glistening eyes
registered zero awareness
her flaccid expression
scarcely changed
when I approached the stage
on a wave of
escalating laughter

I handed her two dollars
and turned away
getting halfway back to
the howling red Os of
my friends’ guffawing faces
the stripper yelled
for my attention

thinking she’d decided
to give me a peek
at her busted titties
beneath her
puritanical blouse
I rushed back to the stage
where the non-stripping stripper
handed back a dollar
whispering

“you accidentally gave me two dollars”

Fetish

She wants to kill god when she cums.
Broken bottles on her breasts,
Fucking Guevara in her dreams.

She’d open her own crotch for the atom bomb.
Give me the statistics of the latest massacre
So I can cut myself to it.

I read to her excerpts of the morgue report
Regarding the deaths of Goebbels’ children
So she can fantasise about their laments whilst orgasm.

Pictures of holocaust stapled to her vulva,
Bile stained, bible pages in the toilet –
The derogatory is obtained.

Personally I’d like to fuck Eve and make her purge
An apology for the fall of man but congratulate her too,
For the ruins of god’s insipid plan.