Who Got It   Right? 

I just read a poem Richard Brautigan wrote  
in February 1958,  
which was about a year and a half before I was born.  
It was a poem about Hamlet and Ophelia getting married,  
which of course Brautigan totally made up,  
and which is also totally fine.  
In this poem, Hamlet  
carries a cormorant under his arm  
and Ophelia thinks that’s swell.  
I imagine the woman who would become  
my mother puttering around,  
with no cormorants in sight,  
in some apartment where she lived  
with the man who would become my dad  
and the baby who would become my sister, 
at the moment Brautigan put pen to paper.  
Maybe the man who would be my dad  
said, right then, to the woman who would be my mom,  
that he wanted a cup of coffee.  
That would have been just like him,  
let me tell you.  
What would she have thought if she could have known  
that her potential son would someday, while drinking  
his own cup of coffee,  
read this poem by an author  
she would someday enjoy  
and be inspired to write a poem  
about her and also about that writer,  
with my dad and sister in cameos? 
It would have blown her mind, most likely.  
Still, she would have probably  
made my future father his coffee,  
because she was always kind in that way. 
Now Brautigan is long dead,  
and the man who became my dad is gone  
and the woman who became my mom  
struggles mightily with dementia.  
Everyone knows what became  
of Hamlet and Ophelia,  
except maybe Brautigan didn’t,  
but that’s neither here nor there.  
My sister hasn’t been a baby for a long time  
and now lives in Florida with her girlfriend,  
and I seldom see her.  
What’s left here are me and the poem.  
The poem and I.  
Before too many years,  
I’ll be letting the poem down, 
when I die,
too.  
How lonely it must be to be a work of art  
as everyone lives, dies,  
mostly never knows you were here  
and then just scatters on the wind.  

Shit Town

No one here listens to Beethoven.
No one reads the Greeks, or Shakespeare, 
or Nietzsche. (Or if they do
they keep it a secret, 
not wanting to be made fun of
for being an elite, or pretentious).
Shit town. 

A town whose mayor moonlights as a life
coach despite his 2 bankruptcies 
and 7-year glue sniffing addiction.
Shit town. 
Where half the cops are peeping
toms and cat burglars by night.
Where the barbers can’t cut hair or hold 
a decent conversation.
Where the plumbers call themselves 
crapologists.
Where every Circle K has a beercan 
philosopher 
standing outside it and the firemen 
just want to hold a big hose.
Shit town.

And it’s true what they say.
Nobody here cares about anything but money;
poetry counts for nothing and no one 
ever seems to mention 
the night Jim Vulva, the town preacher, 
mixed ketamine with Viagra
and mugged a Bolivian tomato picker
behind the trouser rack at Big & Tall.
“Yo, dog, that bling is fly,” he said, then admitted
feeding his ‘libtard’ stepfather to feral 
hogs and collecting the insurance money 
for the next two years.
Shit town.

And the women here have all the charm 
of a goat chewing bumblebees.
And the kids bathe in that irrigation
ditch behind Jersey Mike’s Subs.
And there’s a drive-thru lane at the morgue
because it used to be an Arby’s.
Shit town.
And the rent adjustment commissioner
just got run over
by his own lawnmower
and ended up in the bag.

“Hey, I’ll lather myself 
in the bodily fluids 
of Joe Rogan if I dern-tootin’ want to,”
said Cotton 
Snyder, 32, a disgraced softball
coach and highly qualified bug
zapper
from Big Beaver, Saskatchewan.

And it was the eleventh hour
of the Feast of the Apparition of Our Lady 
of Guadalupe
and we were eating fish head stew
we’d heated up on the dashboard 
of a Buick Roadmaster
when Don Parcheesi, 45, a Chinese
herbalist from Chokoloskee,
ran out into the parking lot with his hair
on fire and offered a pair of eel-skin
slippers to the Judges of Hades.
“You bastards!” he shouted. “Give me life! 
Give me life!
Make
things beautiful!”

Seaman’s Ruin

When mermaids moved his water’s tide
he rain-danced for a drought.
When sea breeze bore him succubi
he spat their nectar out.

‘Neath harpie-studded skies he yearned. 
In nymphen pools he swam.
By legs, and lips, and lies, he learned
the measure of a man.

Though edge to edge he crossed this Earth
lured by a siren sound,
the only fate he didn’t flirt
was six feet underground.

But now he knows of ebb and flow,
the strife of ice and fire,
a giant man slain by a stone,
the death-march of desire.

On solid land he finally rests.
His ship, a sunken shell.
A temptress for his tempest.
A heaven for his hell.

So, show him, gorgon, to your eyes.
He’s been too long on the run.
Just navigate him through your thighs
and drown him when you’re done.

The Atmospheric Perspective

There’s this gig venue I frequent
Along from the central station
A sweat-box of a place, tiny
More like a changing room than a stage
Where a photographic tribute to a friend of mine
Adorns the wall behind the bar she used to work
A scrapbook montage where her face used to be
A dozen fractured facets of herself
Smiling her far-away smile

In the months and years since her suicide
The venue seems to have expanded
The stage stretching away like an illusion
Fading from sight
Becoming indistinct
My reflection as I wait for my overpriced drink 
Served by a faceless new bartender
A bleary shadow in the bar’s vanishing mirror 

The gigs go on
Bands come and go like the seasons
Some more perennial than others
I no longer recognise most of the people in attendance
And no-one seems to have noticed my friend’s tribute hanging askew

When the latest gig is over 
I try not to think about how much time will pass before the next one 
Or how, like her pictures, this one will have taken its place as memory
A toe tag, timestamped and wrapped around something dead and gone
A fixed point of light diminished by darkness

I leave the venue as I arrived, alone
Into a night whose sky seems grey and artificial
As the sound of the encore becomes an indistinguishable part
Of the cacophonous ringing in my ears
The downer rush of the post-gig comedown
Like falling off the edge of a universe expanding

My friend’s suicide was an act of absolute passion 
We were never all that close 
But things have gotten worse since she left
Grown thin and distant 
A big-bang from which everything since
Has been but an ever deadening echo

They say there are more cells in our bodies
Than there are stars in the night sky
If that’s true then I can only feel her absence
As larger than the entire universe

Wild Hunt

If you’d asked me five years ago 
I’d have said no way.  
I swear, Father. I’m not that kind of guy.
There was no precursor.
No seraph or tangle of thorns. 
No birds chirping Lo. Lee. Ta.

And yet here I am, at a country house
in Germany, fucking my niece.
I don’t know if it’s old Europe 
corrupting young America
or young America corrupting old Europe. 
What is the real land of opportunities—

Dear Father, I rode her 
like an eight-legged horse across the night sky;
my lance and reins slapped 
like the jowls of spectral hounds. 
How do you think I get ahead 
in the world— 

Martha’s Final Mass (A Ballad)

This morning Martha came alone
in floral dress and hat
and made her way to third-from-front,
the place she always sat.

She’d never missed a Sunday mass
though pushing sixty-eight
and never failed to put a ten
inside the tithing plate.

I don’t recall her being ill
or looking frail and old
and can’t believe she’s lying there
so rigid, still, and cold.

I’d watched her drink the holy wine
prepared by Father Brown.
A moment later, all I saw
was Martha falling down.

Some people ran. Some others screamed.
Her limbs began to twitch.
She wriggled like a drowning rat
expiring in a ditch.

“At least she died inside a church.
That makes her sort of blessed,”
I thought until I later heard
that Father Brown confessed.

He’d long complained about the way
she fell asleep and snored
throughout the years he’d tried to teach
about the loving Lord.

Today he brought some cyanide
to slip in Martha’s wine,
and now the lady’s got no chance
of reaching sixty-nine.

Wake Up if You’re Asleep

-Wake up if you’re asleep
Because my erect cock awaits you
I tell my newlywed wife
Married by the Church
In Burgos Cathedral
In the Chapel of Christ of the Eggs.
Being king of heaven and earth
Your master and lord
As God commands
I’m going to give you shameful penetration
Through your asshole
Because I don’t want to penetrate you
Through your vagina
Since children disgust me
Because I can’t stand to see them cry
Seeing you nine months pregnant.
You’re still asleep
I’m not waiting for you anymore
I’ll cum and ejaculate on your head
I’ll clean up the colostrum
With that bush of hair
That runs from your head to your cunt.
Married, but without desire
I spend my honeymoon
Feeling the balls of a black man
Who is a bouncer at the hotel nightclub
In Torremolinos, Málaga
Who comes to fuck me in my dreams.
You’re still asleep
With your breasts exposed and no panties
With your slit half open
Your mouth almost wide open.
Now, I’m going to put my cock in you
Until the bell rings
In your beautiful throat.
You seem like this, asleep
A pious little whore
Who with your mouth, now
Suck the glans
Of this divine penis of mine.
-You wretched son of a bitch!
You shout at me when you wake up
Spitting in my face
Everything inside.
With your penis in my throat
You have hurt three things:
My larynx, my two tits
And my heart.
You could have wounded
With your erect thorn
That pimple I have on my back
That looks like a blackberry
A whim of my mother’s
When she was pregnant with me.
Full of passion
I grabbed her buttocks and lifted her up
And with my leafy nail
I pierced
Her four beautiful lips
Announcing to me afterward:
-With that immense penetration
You have made my vagina experience
The Passion of Christ
And the Sorrows of Mary.
So you’ll be screwed
In nine months
You’re going to have my child.
-Well, we’ll give it to my mother-in-law
And your father to take care of.

Conflict of Interest

she was very professional
she did my intake
at the mental hospital
she was a peer volunteer

I had dated her maybe 7 years before that
I met her in the nut job world
of group therapy
and being babysat

she filled out
endless forms
and asked me question after question

“Dan she said, who is your insurance provider?”
but all I kept hearing
as the doors slammed
and automatically locked
was the memory of her voice

screaming
“Fuck me baby, yeah!”

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Paint-By-Numbers

Sometimes when reading poetry
I feel like a grumpy old man
scoffing at abstract art, declaring
“a child could have done that”

Lines and stanzas
pass over my head like
encrypted codes 
I cannot crack

Somebody recently read my book
and described my writing as
“the antidote for pretentious,
indecipherable poetry”

I’ll take that

My poems may be more 
paint-by-numbers than Jackson Pollock
but at least you’re picking up
what I’m putting down

Right?