Relief

Friday reaches for Saturday
like a hand around a throat
while we drink together
inside one darkness or another
lying on bed, bottle between us
like a buoy in the gloom,
boredom gradually taking over
the left side of my brain,
bad memories start to swell up
like a tumor
when she gets up suddenly
switches the light on
and tap dances like a lovable moron,
her breasts going up and down,
such a sight to see, I tell you–
Imagine me in a red dress, she says
red lipstick and expensive earrings
and a diamond necklace that’s killed
more people than Christianity–
wouldn’t that be grand?

I remember how she cried
one night I blew through
both her windows with my fists,
how she chased me down the road
asking for forgiveness,
her bare feet on the asphalt
when I leaned against a car,
my hands dripping blood all over
my pants and shoes
and looked at her saddened face, all teary and panicked
and I realised there’s something wrong with me
always deciding against joy
always hurting souls that deserve better

That night I poured Jim Beam
on my wounds under her kind and caring eyes,
her trembling hand gripping the side of my shirt
and when I picked up the shards of glass from the floor
wearing nothing but shoes and a pierced underwear
she started laughing suddenly
and pointed at my crotch
and I looked down to see my balls
spilling through the hole.

So when she lies on the bed again,
after switching the light off
I tell her that expensive things
on such an authentic soul
can only darken the glow
in this terrible life where we have to do
indecent things to live decently
and in this darkness, in this black room
something in me stirs, something good
that laughs and cares
as her cold feet rub against mine
underneath the covers
I am almost completely certain
I’m happy.

I can feel you smiling in the dark, she says–
I can feel you staring.

***

Previously published on Your One Phone Call

Happened 

the sex with her 
was the best I ever had
man,
it was so good
Her furious face
when she grabbed
and squeezed
my squirting cock
into 
her wide open
mouth
sent me
under the caress
of the moth-white spider-thought
curtains
out the open window
into the hot wafting breeze
shooting far into the stars
deep into the blue grape
licked Summer

Whatever happened to
You?

I sometimes think 
all the years of many women
have been my way of trying to move on
where I’ve known
I can’t

You came to me in the midst of a bad dream
last night
I don’t know what was said 
but I saw again
the fawn drops of your almost child-like eyes
I held so precious
and smelled the baked Texas cool dough of your soaped skin
and found you again resting in my heart as I woke up

3:43 a.m. 
I am awake

Now

I am alive
perhaps
while you are 
at rest

I’m Afraid of Monsters

You have a beautiful singing voice,
but I can’t hear you over the screaming.
This is not theatrical-
these are gigantic women that rape men
of their emotions-
and gigantic men-
men as large as couches-
they devour women-
swallow them whole
like the goa
of ambitious pythonesque
middleclass monsters
out for a bit of fun.
They killed your parents.
They ate the titan girls.
They killed their own children-
at least according to gossip…
at least according to the wolves.
But who can trust those old whores?
They run with hawks
that see everything
but feel nothing.
Good god-
what a dream!
What is this fear of nightmares?
And you can’t even breathe 
with your dusty lungs
full of ants,
and termites,
full of fears 
you can no longer express,
because the child in you
was eaten alive
by a Medusa
driving around
in a beautiful new car-
Hallelujah!

How proud they sit
in their rusty cages-
the dogs with their 
cancerous fleas
have been locked
in with the lions.
These are not 
the brazen beasts from fairy tales-
lies to make children sleep well.
No- these are putrid
down to dirt earth snakes-
white eyed,
no slit
for the trusting-
no heart for the loving-
no warmth for the soul.

These are nightmares incarnate.
You’re not afraid 
because you love them.
You adore the spiny worms
in the ground
that eat your children
in their practice coffins.
They bundle like infant weasels
waiting like buffets
for creatures
of very little wit
but very large ambitions.

Are you uncomfortable with all of this?
These are the monsters that you love.
They eat your parts when you sleep
and you don’t say a fucking word
because these creatures…
they take care of you.

You are the pet of dead-eyed apes
with the brains of frog kings
and the guts of stray insects
that feed birds too fat to fly,
and speak to you in your nightmares-
and tell you how much they miss you-
how much they miss looking into your eyes.

Dirty Books

At least we got the Bible out of the schools,
all that violence and vulgarity
no better for elementary school kids
than the so-called danger of LGBTQ books.

Davis County’s always had its problems,
standing out even in a state as white as Utah,
widespread racial harassment throughout
the school district, hundreds of complaints
simply ignored by the local authorities.

A few years back, a school-bus driver 
slammed the doors
on a biracial kid’s backpack,
dragging him along a few hundred feet.

So I was glad when one of the parents
leveraged the new law aimed at LGBTQ authors
to complain about the “pornographic content”
of the Bible, to get that “sacred text” banned, too.

Of course, they established a “committee”
to review the request, 
all that filth in “Song of Songs”
about his sister’s vagina tasting like wine,
her breasts being “pleasing” to him,
the part in Numbers about raping a three-year-old girl.

Finally, the committee agreed the Bible
was a “challenging read” for children,
best taught and discussed in the home.
The best part? Watching my neighbor,
that smug, hypocritical bigot,
fuss and fume about how the country
was going to hell.

The Ranch

We’re watching late night comedy
Undressed like animals
Woody slides the coke tray out from under the couch
Neil working the swivel-recliner
Upndown
Backnforth
Roundnround
Cold frosty bottles in a brown paper QFC shopping bag on the coffee table
Becca can’t keep still with my boxer shorts stuffed in her mouth
I puffing albuterol nebulizer
Paired with bong tokes 
Neil jokes about the blood of Christian children
He uses instead of bong water 
Woody’s back pain following him from the Wing Stop
Where we’d just pulled a job
It was Becca’s idea
Sometimes she had one
Like a light bulb in an attic
It looks like she wants to say something 
I yank the shorts out
Take your time says Neil we got all night
Little do I know that while I am at work Neil and Woody strap her down to the coffee table and take turns objectifying her body
Woody and Neil
Lumbermen of imminent GenPop video games
I think, Becca starts her eyes wide with speed I forgot my cigarettes at Wing Stop!
Give her something to suck on Ivan, if you can find it Woody chortles
Maybe you left ‘em in the safe we just emptied at gunpoint Neil points out
You think? Becca pipes incredulously
She has one little dainty white sock on while wiping her armpit with the other
I stand up
I sit down
I stand up
I sit down
I stand up
Willya fuckin’ quit that lvan you freak you’re freaking me out yells Woody
I sit
Tufts of cat hair adrift
Somebody needs to clean up after that fucking cat I proclaim
Becca’s baby blues startled, head darting about
My kitten! Where’s my little baby kitty?
Between your not-so-little legs Woody jokes
Comedy punctuated by commercials for insurance against tragedy 
Becca pokes me
Gimme a smoke Eye
She wants a smoke Eye mimics Woody
Give her a smoke Eye parrots Neil
I still wearing my rubberized dead president mask
Fuck all of you 
I got an agenda
Let’s split that stash so I can take this mounting phallus and stick it in Becca before the world ends
They’re used to my scat
My scandalous
Scatalogic
They indulge in it
Even revel 
I can’t phase them 
Woody snorts a chub, chugs a frosty
Starts waving his limp baton around like a schizoid Viennese conductor 
Didja hear him Neil? Whip out that stash
Neil stunned, frazzled
Fantasizing about prenatal Jesus
How to reverse the Resurrection 
Woody like a field marshal of the Lower Rhine 
Brandishing his deflated pizzle in circular motions 
A man in charge
Despite palsied rats running his spinal column
Upndown
We’re flush
From the rush of crime and chemical intake
Frosty bottles
Cold skin like Japanese porcelain on a mist-shrouded morning after the flattening of Hiroshima
We got the shivers 
The fidgets
Wary of sirens slashing apart the sky
Random phones ringing
Angels burned at the stake
Woody’s wee willy flopping like a wet sock puppet
I explode
Damn it to hell you morons I demand my cut this instant!
Becca prods
Becca’s got issues
Becca’s got needs
Becca wants her membranes stimulated
Olfactory
Pulmonary 
Anally
Let’s take a shower Eye
Let’s do Jäeger bombs
Let’s do a line
Light my smoke willya
Rub my back
My feet
Pull my hair, slap my ass
Make me one of those omelettes you make
Becca twists around
Doesn’t he make the best omelettes?
Becca talking to the wall again 
Seeing her friend Melissa again
Melissa the bar slut everyone wants a piece of
A cute fat young thing
Who’d suck you off for a double vodka cran
Until the night she got super drunk at a party on a boat and fell overboard 
Nobody even noticed she was gone til the next day when her body was discovered floating face down in Shilshole Bay
There was a wake for Melissa at Wing Stop
On Taco Tuesday
Becca accuses me of lusting after Melissa’s fat stinky fanny
Is that any way to honor the deceased I wonder aloud
Admit it Eye! You want that ass! Everybody does! You’re no different! Fucking men!
Too true Woody agrees
She did like dick Neil adds as he flops back down on the squeaky recliner
Empty-handed
Any motive for rising in the first place forgotten 
Must’ve been days later maybe hours but realistically just minutes
Bills rolled
Benjamins
Crispy from the take
Powder mirror passed
Smudged with gas
Gas from ass
Frosties quaffed
But not so chilled now
Neil announcing a need to drain the liz
I enact my agitate-Tourette’s routine
Stand
Sit
Stand
Sit
Stand
In jerky pantomime 
Working on the Stoli now
Surreptitious hits from the kitchen freezer between rapid pacings
I look closer
Between bags of frozen peas and Trader Joe’s wontons
The big fucking bag of cash
Our foolproof stronghold at the Ranch
Top-load freezer in the kitch
Guys not playing with very many cards in the deck here
I re-animate my Myoclonic epileptic routine
Sit up
Stand down
Sit up
Patent that shit
As Neil settles deep into recline
Stretching out
Swivels from the flatscreen 
Accordions spine straight up 
To grab a bottle with a lurch of the chair’s mechanism out of which erupts a
Sudden
Blood-curdling squeal
Like horror movie macabre
What the fuck gasps Woody
Becca practically leaps into my skin 
Neil petrified 
Frozen in space
Spasmodically I sweep into action
Becca caught in my wake like a house in a hurricane 
Woody clutches behind his back
At his spasming sciatica
Neil gone dormant
Catatonic
Shock he’s in shock right, Eye?
Quite observant my love
But you might want to step away for a sec
Why what’s wrong is Neil okay? Should we call a parametric?
Naw
Actually 
I believe this is more a job for the hazmat crew
A what? Omg what’s that smell?
I stoop to lift up the swivel-rocker’s flap of fabric
Sure enough
The cute kitten had covertly crawled into the mechanism
Warm dark and cozy like a womb
Until the shifty weight of Neil returned
Woody flat on his back on the couch as if gunshot
Writhing 
In turmoil
I tease
Can I get ya a beer Woody? A toke? How ‘bout a little railer? Good for what ails ya?
I sing dangerously close to exalt
Woody waves me away grimacing 
Neil inert
Zombified
The rapists
Out of commission 
Becca glued to me like duct tape on an open wound
High time indeed to
Decamp
Vamoose
Skedaddle
All the obsolete terminologies for disappearing
Throw something on girl, any old burlap sack will do
I tug at Woody’s track-suit pockets for the keys to his pickup as he squirms and struggles
As Neil fights petrification
Becca tottering naked as a wasted Venus yet still with one dainty white sock on
Woody fighting back now despite palpable paroxysms of torment
In a grapple of disrobed scarecrows
I yell
Damnit woman we gotta scram! Put some clothes on and in the freezer? There’s a bag with the green! Grab that stash, I’ll be in the truck!
Suddenly my marble effigy of a tart sprouts wings
Keys clenched in a fist I ransack the hall closet
Holes punched through the door
Like every other door at the Ranch
Snag a bloodstained chef’s coat, stiff black leather chaps
Clutching my privates with an old catcher’s mitt
I flee
Out the door and into the black
Becca already tucked in the passenger seat of the truck
How’d she get that fast?
Didja get the goods?
Becca with SpongeBob pajamas on
Her ample anatomy jutting and swimming
Her face streaked with tears
Lamenting her massacred pussycat
I gun the engine which screams like a horse being butchered alive
We tear out of there
I snatch the brown paper sack
Gaze salivating within
Wtf?
At a bag of frozen peas
Becca where the fuck’s the cash?
What? I grabbed the green like you said! Why do we need frozen peas anyway?
I still wearing the dead president’s mask
I try removing it
I tug and yank
But it seems fused to my face
Becca starts laughing 
Frantically 
Idiotically
Maniacally hyena-like
The night speeding with hallucinatory flashbacks
Now you got a dick for a nose!
A dick for a nose
A dick on your face
Adickadadickadadickadadick!!!
Keep laughing wench! I scream
You’re the one with the dead fuckin’ pussy!
Sonny and Cher on the AM radio
John and Yoko on the FM dial
Sid and Nancy dead at the Chelsea
Bonnie and Clyde we are not

He Who Loves Grape Juice

no poem today 
why? 
pickled, fried 
last night 
one of those 
never empty wine glasses 
great dinner 
great talk 
but who can remember? 
oh, once or twice a year 
Bacchus reigns 
converses about the past 
the characters that are shadows 
so many dead 
diabetes 
drugs 
cancer 
oh just a list of common afflictions 
but the characters 
that saw sunrises, midnight moons 
Paris 
the mirror in the Charles Village Pub 
the interior of a deep philosophic mind 
making illegible notes to itself 
the poet whose best work 
was published after her death 
we toasted them all 
again and again 
luckily my wife drove home 
traffic patterns were askew 
for me 
and so this morning 
unsympathetic for sure 
few tolerate overindulgence 
though the wines of the world flowed 
from Spain to New Zealand 
we helped diverse economies 
with our indulgence 
but this morning 
who really wants to type words 
the sound of typing magnified 
in the pickled raw mind 
the typing arm attached 
to the arm of another arm 
and that to that of a hammer 
and so this morning 
feels like a vampire 
that didn’t escape the sun 
or the stake 
how shriveled raisins are 
and the reasons 
for overindulgence

Rain Don’t Break Bones

We invented poetry because
some of us 
don’t know 
how to masturbate.

Rain don’t break bones 
I tell the woman
beside me in bed.

She flicks my head
and says let’s fuck instead.

Funny we both know
the what instead of.

All the while
rain’s been falling outside.

Abigail’s Party

At Abigail’s party
Farrah says she’s one hundred percent 
committed to romance. 
I had a crush on a French bartender 
who never read Houellebecq, god 
we were bored to tears. Do you remember
newspapers, she says. I mutter something 
about wearing my best shirt to the Prado 
to see Goya’s Black Paintings
and she lifts her glass 
and lists the number of ways 
the world is a mystery

                                  take Abigail’s party 

For instance —we’re in a hallway 
pink as a vulva, and Joan 
saw a UFO over the Unadilla drive-in 
on Friday. Laura is dead. The dog sleeps 
at Paul’s feet. John and Lise fight 
with cudgels, then apologize to Chloe 
for not having a car. Henry joined the circus 
says Bret. There’s a fair young man in the kitchen
clumsily lipsticked. Has anyone seen Abigail?
Albert no longer has the sparkle 
in his eye. Nothing happened 
particularly, and the nightcap crowd 
can’t be cut from the wall. You’re wearing 
your best shirt again, and that’s enough.

God Is A Place

God is a place with no scope—a room with no space, walls of no height, imaginary windows, illusionary doors. It cannot be gleaned from out here or in there, nor in thought or dream. It is a place where nothing exists—a place in name only; oblivion, death.

It always was, it is, and it forever will be – yet never were, and can never become. In this paradox lives the illusion of scale and creation, growth from motion and emotion, free will and meaning; a place that is not God.

Perforce, you exist and life is part of something rather than nothing. Perforce, you feel there are choices you make. Of course, these are the illusions. You can attempt to believe, seek solace– distraction as well—in the stories we tell to avoid the truth, looming: You are a prisoner of Eternity until you return to the place that is God—a place you never left. 

It is a beautiful and horrifying thing.

***

Previously published in Lothlorien Poetry Journal

Right Here

Not far from where you sit, right now,
just a mile or two away,
there is a house
you never really notice.
It has white, vinyl siding,
a small porch, a basement.
A single rose bush decorates the front yard.
Not far from you there is a man
sitting in a chair and savoring
the weight of a gun in his hands.
It might be a new gun
or something he’s had forever.
Maybe it was his inheritance
from a careless father
or he bought it from the back of a van
or at a gun show.
Depending on where you are,
the man might be holding
a semi-automatic rifle
or a .22 caliber pistol
or maybe a .357 Magnum.
Not far from you, a woman,
or child, or man stands, oblivious,
in a kitchen, maybe chopping onions, 
or on a sidewalk,
or is maybe entering a school or movie theater.
A commonplace horror
will happen very soon.
It will happen so close to where you are,
right this second,
that a stray bullet
could come through your window
or even a wall
and take you the fuck out.
Or it might take out your child,
your wife, your dog.
You have always
held that “Guns don’t kill people.
People kill people.”
What about when your own baby
has been shredded
by high caliber bullets?
What about when you don’t even know
you are screaming
until someone puts a needle in your arm?
But you still have a little time
before it all goes down, so relax.
Drink your coffee and don’t think
about your neighbors.
Look out your window at America.