We Are Flying Down to Rio 

After the coup, in the year of half-returns 
you talk about the city of pirates
or is it pussy, king of the pirates —I don’t know, Lulu
you’re always playing games 
and I’m smart-alecky in my brown blazer
entertaining hangovers, and yet, and why 
who can say. The weather clusters without cohesion 
and we go to the MFA for a single painting
of rosy rusty tones and street lamps
like flayed angels

then off to a party 
half-remembered, on Linden
where I watch you 
walk through walls, dividing sense 
like a double-agent, lo—
the boatswain is there
and the army of the queen, 
we are flying down to Rio, someone says 
and Rachael’s risotto has me shedding marvelous tears
again.

L’appel du vide

The carrion blossom
of her flower-stained body
awash with the heady scent
of venom & ambergris
in lewd open bloom
like a pall
laid thick & heavy
before blear & leering eyes

Abnormal petting
vivarium seduction 
scorpions, leeches,
jumping spiders
& bearded dragons
a little death & taxidermy
fringe-dwelling chaos
a place of domestic 
serenity amidst
lascivious destitution

Unlikely as it seems
I envy perhaps
the funhouse
of fractured mirrors
erected to her afterlife

Perhaps it’s simply 
the call of the void

The Poem Whimpered

I could see the poem wriggling its wrists,
tied behind it on the chair it was sitting in,
not yet panicking but clearly uncomfortable,
the rope burning its flesh.

“God damn it,” I shouted at the poem,
swinging the rubber hose at my side.
“You’re going to be lyrical and profound,
or I’m going to make you suffer!”

The poem whimpered.

the god of chicken wing thieves

my fate’s in God’s hands, now,
says the woman arrested
for stealing a million and a half
dollars’ worth of chicken wings
meant for the school district’s
free lunch program for
underprivileged children during
the CoVid crisis.
apparently, there’s a black
market for back-alley wings.
during those two years she sold
eleven thousand cases of wings
to fund her gambling addiction.

now, I’m not certain the god
of chicken wing thieves is open
to the prayerful petitions
of someone who would deny
the chicken appetites
of poor school children but
a person well-versed in the 
vagaries of karma might opine
a woman who has gambled away
that much money with nothing
to show for it has already
had her fate decided for her.

Trade-Offs

I paid 79 bucks to check my suitcase,
and Frontier Airlines
broke one of the wheels, claiming
my damage was due to extreme turbulence,

but I slept through most of that flight
and made it through intact.

I was returning from
the AWP writer’s conference–
a thinly veiled, non-stop commercial
for various MFA programs.

Would I have a hoity-toity writing style
if I paid thousands for an advanced degree,
and would the turnstiles of literature
swing open for me at last?

Would I be ushered into panels,
while enraptured would-be novelists

sat in uncomfortable folding chairs,
awaiting my well-rehearsed opinions?
Ah, to be put up in the finest Doubletree Inn,
with free Uber rides throughout the city.

Instead, I must worry about a 
fucking $79 charge
and my broken suitcase from Marshall’s.

I guess it beats a lot of
other things I could be doing,
but not by much.

Hedy Lamarr Goes to Space

The heads of Easter Island nod their way down Main Street.  Frothing cream pie 
Add to Cart girls hooked up to Hismith Premium fuck machines like charging stations
for the woman on the go.  And I am up on the third floor, jacking off to a picture 
of Hedy Lamarr in a space suit.  She was friends with Howard Hughes long before 
the Mormons filled his arms with broken needles.  Why does everything sound 
like an unlevel washing machine when I’m trying to get to El Dorado?  
Long, frenzied strokes like the dirty talk space program trying to get off right there 
on the launch pad.  A grandstand full of binoculars to cheer me on.  
I feel at home in the great patriotic womb, let out a succession of tiny farts 
like escaped prisoners fanning out across the county.  Snow squalls from 
Radio Canada, Farley Mowat and the tragic wheat kings.  Now, that is a band 
I would go see, if I were not chafing the carrot with these stainless-steel veggie 
peelers for hands.  One hand really, like someone who refuses to clap.  
What a royal asshole he is!  Probably skins cats with an engraved butterknife!  
Who doesn’t enjoy the show? I know I can’t enough.  Dwarves humping midgets 
pumping little green men in some sort of evolutionary fuck buddy bouncy castle 
to bring the bucking big bang cosmos home.

Geneviève

there you were: star-crossed
                      & stark, nipping the neck
               of Calvinus, flicking Winstons from windowsill, 
                              scribbled MA sonnets 
                        & scrunched love letters smothered
                                                    under feet & frown, 
                                          Twelve Carat Toothache
                                     cutting the silence,
            your rib cage crushing, lungs 
                                   heaving in the June heatwave
               with undiagnosed pneumonia
                                  & pleural effusion, 
                                 coughing blood
                            & wheezing cheater

Fuck Haikus III

Piss splatters my breasts
The dry earth drinks the soft rain
You drench me in gold

On my hands and knees
thunder rolls over the hills
Your cock in my ass

You sit on my face
Roosters crow in the hen house
Your balls fill my mouth

Bit gagged and bridled
I wait in a clover field
Horse and cock rear high

Helpless in shackles
Sacrificed under the moon
Impaled on your cock

My nipples are hard
The beach is stony and hot
You collar my neck

You shoot so much cum 
The stream is fast and frothy
My mouth overflows

The Beat

A tale as old as time.  You’re one of three dirty cops representing the different archetypes of masculinity all falling for the same dame.  She’s pure and unattainable and touching her is the same as signing your own death warrant.  She is also a prostitute.  She is also an heiress. She is also cunning.  She is also elegant. She is also able to hold her liquor. There’s just one problem. Her sister is missing, her father is missing, her husband is missing, her lover is missing, her mother’s will is missing. The case is hot.  The leads are cold.  People all over town are getting iced. Someone’s buying up all the water rights because this is the desert and because it’s the very essence of life. All of this while others chase down stone birds. Still others pull insurance scams.  Tough guys whose appearance is their whole identity wave heaters and swing blackjacks.  A kid in a newsboy cap will give you hope and praise and grief.  The kid is your lookout.  The kid is your go-for.   He saved your life once.  You saved him.  Either way you’re responsible so when you see him on the street you toss him a grin and a nickel.  Everyday you keep looking for justice but a closed case file hits just as good.

Re: Man From P vs. T

Pulling out his guts via dildo.
Do you know how long that takes?
That’s twenty-eight hours of nighttime butt-fucking.
Butt-fucking in his boiler room flat – hung, drawn and quartered.
That’s four-hundred-and-thirty-two orgasms.
A dilation sufficient to consume the polymer base. 
It’s stuck to the doorsill by suction,
planted on the mirror so he has to stretch
on the toothpaste-stained sink rim into the slight alcove.
Stretch under the narrow but incandescent shelf light.
The shelf light like the sun, 
like the oil truck that exploded on the M4 corridor,
like the car bomb outside the software infrastructure HQ,
the terrorist cell house in residential Dorset.
It’s a scalpel for his insides, a lifting hook.
A commixing of prosthetic cock and the turrets of his animal body.
His seagull-white bladder, 
his monkey-brown rectal cavity,
his pink-red-orange elbow joint.
The unseen videos, phantasms, of his undergrowth,
awash with blood and the secreting yellow.
His guts get ripped out at 11:51 AM on his
student living bed.
Sheets muddied with dried lube, piss, spit, cum, blood,
bird shit, dog froth and chunks of body,
and now an overspill of beer shit and unprocessed waste.
He doesn’t react. It’s still not fetid enough.
The warm, alien parts rub against his self-spanked butt cheeks
lying twisted on his side.
He smears the newest cum batch over his lips.
Enters a neutral wavelength.
Reaches for his bedside table and takes a swig of Jack Daniels
from the bottle.
Blood in his missing teeth he knocked out four hours before.
University student, nineteen, but crow’s feet, sunken eyes,
acrylic pallid flesh polish.
Thinning hair.
Another swig of Jack. A night-out that lasted two months,
came back with no teeth, went to sleep with no gallbladder
or spleen. With cow guts, the sensation of having antlers,
but really just nodes he plugged on for electro-sex torture,
which he forgot about.
He gets onto his knees on the fluid-soaked mattress
and picks up his dusty-red entrails.
He wields them like a joined-up scythe, a flabby scarf.
Extremely, deliciously red when held in concert.
He feels the light, zero-gravity drag of something decoupling from within.
He punches hard under his bottom rib to distract from it.
At last, he piles every last meaty pound of it into his bedside drawer.
Slams it shut with a bit caught in the closing.