Average American Asshole

my teenage son bullies me into recycling
my husband bullies me into writing a werewolf novella
because literary fiction doesn’t sell at horror conventions
pretty sure I’ll get into some kind of heaven when I finally die
but right now I’m busy spraying baseboards with orange oil
and shuffling tarot cards to pay bills
because I’m not hot enough for OnlyFans
and not trending enough for Penguin Random House

Oranges

The antique jar contains shards
of pottery from the “ones that
came before” near the Puya
Cliffs in northern New Mexico

I stare and wonder if I can continue,
my robot mail throwing elbow is 
worn out, surgery and cortisone no
longer work, drugs help, but not
when mixed with alcohol

I failed at suicide three times,
trying to make it look accidental,
so my lady and kid could collect

Robins are pulling worms from
the ground, winos are pissing in
doorways, cardinals are all red
on telephone lines, they all have 
more freedom than me

Perhaps a spectacular car crash
into a river or lake, deciding to
continue and laugh at the orange,
that spreads its legs all juicy
like an excited woman

All tomorrows seem like yesterday,
but, I will live at least for today.

Nothing Happens in June  

The news in Berlin this morning is about 
what you’d expect: a 19-year-old was stabbed 
in the back and gut by a stranger 
on Möckernstrasse; there was a femicide
of a 34-year-old mother in Köpenick; 

a group of neo-Nazis confronted a man 
outside a Späti calling him a longhair 
and a leftie and a tick. Zecke 
is the German word for tick. It’s also a pejorative 
for a foreign-looking person. 
“Du Zecke!” hollered the neo-Nazi,
then smashed his beer bottle 
over the long-haired skull of the tick, 
concussing him.

Elsewhere 
in the city, a drug dealer was beheaded 
by a client 
with a machete; a climate change 
activist 
is nearing death on day 90 
of his hunger strike and here 
on my street where someone used blue chalk 
to scrawl ALLAH IS 
A DWARF on the sidewalk, a drunk 
is drinking beer from a tennis ball
can.

Greasepaint Inferno

Bring the fire crew for the open pit,
strewn dead graveflowers stinking up the smoke like garlic,
a morbid joke. Cretinous clowns emerge from the smoldering wreckage, faces peeling off, black gloves shocking with zapper buzz wounds, their creepy libidinous psalms propounding lunatic poetics 

Tombs with a view, their blazing polka dotted costumes run askew to logic,  nightmare-fuelled jettison setters sitting on a fuselage eating rainbow-tainted meat, gore mongering harlequin androids atrophied in their body suits

Discolored lips enlarged with malformed paint which drips, 
yet another inferno underneath burnt out eyeballs
and giant jiggling shoes filled with red jello shot jism, loaded with tiny toy guns that will not stop protruding their way inside this never ending nightmare circus

The latest flame burns all the perverted clown shoes off, forces them
to be replaced with stripper heels, insists they perform grotesque 
dance moves in front of the sizzling open mic which is programmed to explode 

The poltergeist clown doll is pole dancing within
your bedroom closet, waiting for you to open the door
into hell. Bells of satiety peel, the notorious harlequinade spread like
jam on sex sandwich bread, as she executes the funeral dance, bump and  grindcore romance, wounds from charred, twisted and bizarre wombs rippling like curses through the circus tents, as bent, deformed and violent nether-clowns down their party favors, drugged and lulled to sleep in cotton candy ecstasy, with one, two, three times three maledictive curses spread prodigiously 

The oldest of the clowns forms the apex of a rotting and sadistic pyramid in which hellbent volcanic ash pours out of the mother clowns mouths like a gravy vat of drying blood. A mass attack heap of gelatinous grits, another fusion mix of horror sauce, grinding in to the griddle cake, singed dressing, a side dish of slasher porn, broken clown neck bone

Torn recipes for macabre meat and greets, faded out photographs of 
the St. Valentine’s Day Strip Bar massacre, where the lush and lurid 
gothic clowns pour themselves down the poles of ice and woe 

in an orgy of bloody telepathic silences. The thin blue Picasso clown and the fat pink Rubens jester fester like Bubonic buboes made of boobs, gawked at by randy rubes. Two clown girls face off in the ring, with outsized boxing gloves made of corn meal, landing kill blows down to reeling iron toes. 

A hawker of phlegmy circuses clashes with the berzerk and seismic flirts of the clown hookers union, that stoops to conquer time with pyroclastic rhymes for days, mirrorhall maze of hallucinated stitches down the back of catastrophic events in which a strained amalgamation of Snow White’s Stepmother applies a ton of clown makeup to cover up her aging face, then stares at her evil clown head until every mirror cracks, the glass breaks through the windows, the windmill splits in half, revolving clown heads drip with blood

Convulsing clown heads split in half, one black eye, one dark red eye
with giant millipedes crawling out, unfurling, preparing to light another fire, turn the whole human race into damned clowns, place the most hideously diabolical clowns in leadership positions.

The Painful Sunrise

When you realize, uh-oh, the last two were probably three too many and you should’ve been in bed hours ago, but the music kept playing and the company’s so good! So good! So good! And her skirt, too revealing – her legs, too far apart. And the way she throws her head back with every shot, and every laugh, it’s just the way – aha aha – you like it. So, you chase down one more dark alley and, sure, her lipstick’s too red – her dyed curls, too wet and too coincidental, but you don’t stop ‘til you get enough and it’s not enough ‘til it’s way too much. 

And the moment arrives when you say, “Throw your head back like that one more time, baby, I’ll keep you up all night.” And she laughs a laugh too reckless and bites her lower lip – and so do you – and her eyes roll back in her head, and you taste the lipstick on her teeth… You’re two strangers in the night exchanging saliva… Soon she’s back to doing backstrokes and you’re still keeping up, but her face matches the lipstick now and she starts blowing out the candles, starts pissing on the sparks. You’re not the reason why she came and you’re not the reason why she stayed. There’s a place she needs to be, but you try, “Ooh babe, what would you say we go watch the moonset together?”

And the music keeps playing and you soldier on alone in a company unfamiliar. When another skirt sits down, and your tab’s still open, and you can only see her with your fingers, but she doesn’t seem to mind (your tab’s still open). And you tell her how you really feel in your comfortable despair, but she thinks you’re just paranoid, and she may be right cause there are shadows on the wall that weren’t there before and the light is getting stronger and you wish it would hold off just a little while longer. But the sun is on the rise. It waits for no one. It’s tapping on the window, hurling insults, asking questions you don’t wanna answer right now.

***

Previously published in Dear Booze

Dirty Needle America

Pink plastic singing electric
showtunes from Thailand.

There was an article 
in the UFO rags 
about fentanyl candy from China.

Fat queer whore house America
lit up like the fourth of July,
and was first in line
with all its blood-splotched dollars.

Ugly 

The bar was ugly 
and she was ugly 
and I was ugly,
at least in mood.

Made you wonder where 
the beauty ever went?

Not with her gaggle of 
gorgon friends,
I can tell you that.

Or that creepy comb-over bartender 
with roofies for hands.

The walls were ugly
and the floors were worse.

No one was getting laid,
and if they were,
the sex was ugly, too.

This Was a Blank Page

Words hide, words 
move through walls and fly out
into distant minds.  Words
hide the truth, or burn
through pages and paint walls
with fire-shadows.
They grant and they steal,
or stay up all night
wondering what shape to form.
They raze cities and
raise the dead—They come apart
like pollen spores, or follow us
into our dreams.  Words define themselves 
with other words, and mean nothing 
without them.  They limit the brain, 
but ask deep questions.  
They bring us through grief and betrayals
with cold comfort.  
From a pile of rubble 
they build other worlds.  They name us
and gather in and at
our wake.  They exonerate
or execute.  Words come home to us 
so we can put them in
the right order, but after this
they don’t think of us.  We need them
and we need them to leave
so we can sit at last in peace
and age with the silence.

The Year I Fell in Love with a Dimes Square Girl

the Dimes Square girls are at it again 
reading Lunch Poems 2 over lunches amuse-bouche,
the sky like a mango flavored Juul, Manhattan at noon 

is a wet brain and when I finally heal from the trauma 
of a happy childhood I find every pussy at the corner of Canal 
and Orchard to be a Beaux-Arts shrine

to acronyms and floating signifiers. Here is one hand
of the Red Scare. And here is another 
trembling with the psychic power that Kunst 

is the German world for “art.” 
O to be young, to navigate you 
like an open manhole on Second Avenue, 

you fucked with breakneck inventiveness
aesthetic and artifice,
we shot the dawn like Burroughs

missing badly, because you hated Burroughs 
preferred Ferlinghetti, and besides 
that was the same night Nikki went toe-to-toe

with Death’s six serpent sons,
and Hans got busted doing coke in the Swan Room
and Thom didn’t have a clue about the Sally Fowler Rat Pack

our love was doomed time and time thereafter 
a decade late and a trust fund short,
your desire to be desired so fleeting I couldn’t keep up.