Put A Shiner on It

Oh temple un-slurred, unnamed
to be priced,
unbecoming price reader

I’ll be homeless at the bar
code reader,

macho up to the confetti
man for syllables which,
showing deference
I’ll forget how to say
then spend the rest of the night

putting the ham and eggs back
on my grandfather’s jokes:

“I’ve only had tea Martoonies Ocifer..”

such time as made the wooden years
a mantle mount above us all

the Midwestern fireplaces forged out their
indifferences from uncertainty

and named her Art.

hark hark,we are making art here

The Art that comments on itself
the rough cloth on the door
nail catch of skin,
I'm in too:
Name this.

What is the space where art is madof art?

Hey Paw, getchyee college fund.My can put a finger innit?

Looky here Boy, there's wharn them dead juices a-bubble up. Don't Toucheet!

Soufflé & Sticks

Tender spirit, living, father. Despite this quality, you cry out in the night. Face enshrined in breathing apparatus and life’s true intention: the struggle we pretend is a game to make it sweeter. Me? I'm forming a likeness out of remembered trees, leafless winter trees and a mood of zombies coming back through the cold like parking attendants to the gray morning, or waiters summoned to dance in dark uniforms. In this spirit, father, I struggle too. The labored sky, the half remembered ideal that pursues me through conversations on devastation, on recalling myself, memory, trees. For the waiter’s tip there’s nothing. No retrograded tenderness. No chivalrous denial of foreboding. The meal you ordered is coming. Quick. Undress.

Yeah, I got nothing to add to that....

*****

Mysterion Hyperdrive Daycare

Linked to fatuous underclothes, I’m the forecastle’s blurb,
Delicate like whiskey-breath on a dad at daycare.

That perilous infirmary, I implode the wax of its being.
Inside are candies, sliver and red and naughty

Like tinkling, like the twine of a homeless shanty
That binds my heart, my chronicle or self-repair;

Or, mechanically, the way I ignore what goes on at
The bus stop, the guy passed out, the wonder of his abandon

Shuffles me out of some delirium made of cakes, traffic horns
Defrosting me from the stalactite habit, a daycare

I’ve mucus-ed around me, a cocoon made of worship,
I’m shifting already under the weight of. Back off, Translucency!

You unwind by linkage, this cupcake of total discard, fondled
Until the finger holes, groove twists, are ice cream shelves of shame.

Horn-ed KidneyBomb

Barbarous orchid blooming in my kidney
you are my moral roll-over to which

external maintenance becomes only political
esp. in light of this pain

this ranch grass infused with terrorist dreams,
the women in tears, strong and clever

dying for recognizance and butter.

I inhabit a dream of bile, where every tube
is constricting around my stone

I admire this. Now if only my urethra
would burst into blossom.

Motorcycling in East Tennessee

If you can disintegrate the Walmart, the photo centers, the dollar stores come every block, then there is nothing but distance and freedom to envelope you in the Tennessee Valley and thus, you are free. Turn left and bump through ragged hills, up mountains and just past the Carolina line headed toward Asheville and there you are in true Appalachia. Appalachia enough to murder you. Burned out Victorian timber towns still standing, out of habit. There is not enough time to describe mountain wastes because they are not wastes. There are trees enough and bearshit and possum crossings and creeks to show you what heaven looks like and churches one hundred years old, come out of nowhere on the mountain, “welcome to bikers.” Sure, those people wouldn’t piss on you if you were on fire, but I don’t worry about dumping my bike, should I blow a curve with gravel hiding in it’s apex, on some lonely mountain crag. Because the next old somnbitch to come along in his beater Ford would carry me the hundred miles back home. Under the racing cumulus and blue sky piercing. And anoint my feet and wash my face, with an old wash cloth from the truck, rinsed there in the steel cold of the creek coming down off that mountain. Under that mountain that I practiced my religion carving around, that mountain that he carved his religion under. That mountain that you have never seen.

Dog toe kidney stone forever until you’re dead,

And then they don’t hurt as much. Until your undead dogtoe toenail heeds the calling, within it’s fungus, then drags you earthward. Up’t thine crust. Where-inst first you lied. Back there twards Tallahasseee with piss burnin’…Ah-whooooo and smokestack lightnin’, my brother you got all those miles of swamp ahead of ye. Cans’t thee not welcome those blessed acres with arms upraised? Would thee not pass thine stone and pass unto the last unpaved florida acre, unharmed, unfeeling, pecker hard as a staff with rigor mortis divining the blessed path? Through Alligator turf, walking on slime? Salvation I say, is upon thee, honorable Snodgrass. Encapsulated within thy loins of doubt is the stone of truth, waiting to be passed. Believe in the promise of the missing ballsack of thine overheated panhandle. Trust in the bukakke sperm load that was Cuba left long-ago around the missile crisis. Democracy floating un-nurtured and left for dead on the frigid loins of the Caribbean. I got nine million Christians for every one million muslims on the line right now and they are ready to leap up out their barkaloungers and march towards Tallahassee to see the poet-child walk on the marshes, ride on the backs of divine reptilian grace, benighted by Jeb Bush, here he comes, the undead poet King, with fingers creaking, pointing towards the promised land. Ocala, beloved Ocala!

Re: Horn-ed Master (Ah God, You Had to Bring That Up)

You see, faithful viewers, it wasn’t the house that Mr. Snodgrass and I worked on in Church Hill, Richmond, Virginia, together, all through the blazing summer of 1998, that did it, it was the gate. Forget that the client shorted us twelve hundred dollars on the final payment, it was the gate and that we were there all summer, together. That we had to let ourselves in each day through the gate off the alley into the back yard. Disregard the alley off the hill with the shit-heap cars down it, the mattresses and gas cans. Imagine The Gate that I had rigged up with a couple of nails to keep it closed, first, we were going to write to Fine Homebuilding about the cleverness of the gate, then to Car and Driver about the gate, then finally, toward august, when hammers had been thrown, and “DID you KILL The DOG?” that the letter to the editor about the gate was to HE, our demon overlord of the abyss. And yes, by then he would have enjoyed it. But who’s to say you’re not reading that very love note right now?

First saved message, sent November 2, 2005

"Yes, thank you verizon,
now my friend can call me anytime he wants, at eight o'clock in the morning, because it’s free. Yes, Thank you, Verrrizon. Oh shambling verizon, oh murderous network, oh connectivity
Oh soccer, soccer friend, to friend of phone calling, and Whoa! Darting!
Elderly darter, darting cross the road! Elderly darter! Oh,
construction project, you go on and on, across millennia,
big pothole!"

To delete this message press seven, to save it in the archives, press nine, to exit press star.

7

Dear Horn-ed Master

Today my little toes are become animal toes
and when I open the door to my apartment
I swear there’s a Zombie there waiting to go tooth at me.
I swear it’s not the color of my toes that reminds me of the color of the Zombie’s teeth.
But there it is,
coming together anyway.

How can I keep the two images separate?
Especially when the gnawing aperture
of disease combusts upon my TV mouth, claw-mouth?

Oh Wooly Mammoth Tamer,
I cringe before your clippers.
But more so when the figures of the Lawn Workers stitch past my windows in broad daylight.
That’s when I know the cut green things turn brown.
But don’t they have to die before they turn brown?

Always Faithfuly Your
Humble Clawing Scratcher

Discretion

At first I coaxed a large print format from the days. The awning of my primrose life. The goading in my forehead, lurching escape-ward into up, the roof, a balcony, directions presupposed by the dictionary. Terms which I rejected on principle, zombies clattering away.
At this point I can’t even walk the dog without thinking how tenuous the streetlamp is.
And even as they eat the teenage neighbor girl, her pinks smudging in the dirt, her smug looks turns to eating back, reciprocal. Teeth outraged in sleepwalking. Not new or changed externally, but the supposed offer of keeping track, of sameness obfuscates my madness (So Now I Watch T.V.)
What was before a name embossed on a doormat, or enprincessed along the circumference of a license plate I gave up to the lights going out, blank and the same.
Even the birds, unashamed, twittered language through the carnage. The girl, zombie, neighbor, cast her shadows on the doorway. Feet, like life, patterning directions to take.

Emperor Pituitary,

First not on the constabulary diet. Listed emblem of health food degradation and quality assurance Overlord: Redeem me!

I’m in debt to scholars made of pumice grounds. Offer me coffee, you ass, then leave, just leave the room intended.

I’m in the waiting room of the Zobificationists
He’s asking for credentials and I show him my teeth.

Up close I’m good at digging as well so when the Emperor inclines me, I’ll slip wiggly into the fissures set up as internment destinations.

The process goes smoothly. Apparently it takes a life time. Then the skin crawls a little and the fingers make dig claws to the forehead.

Dice

Not insidious, and not yet binomial, the squeeze in the doorway is looping over your cortex, plural, cortices.
Brain in frozen mode.
These Zombies are waiting in line, a freezing line in the Frozen north somewhere, near a road.
They have addresses for you, numbers from old girlfriends.
The news says little fingers spread disease, diseases spread on fingers, touching samples,
I remember samples of things you left me in your touch.
Little drug. The Zombies are waiting for the bus in the cold. There’s a road and some snow. Headlights appear. The bus pulls to a stop.
Tapping on the glass. Your uncoiling fear. The freeing finger. Now you have two names:
The Waiting You
And
The You Which Is Addressed.

Twinkling

Blessed Nurturing, ten toes and a bite mark outlining your life, the bank account Zombie, trace amount of self respect vetoed to the winds and to that incurable eating frenzy next door to every lame-ass representation you curled up into, claiming victory.
The disease of the Zombie carried by the viewing of the Sasquatch. Those incredible toes. That foot Size!
I run away in the afternoon.

President Rapture

Oh I’m sorry. The dead return the change from the seats I’ve sat in. My fecal overture to the cloudy bottom, coalescent.
Oh, I’m sorry. No I’m sorry. Your signal bears jiggly underarm fat, the banners of dissention.
Here: the Zombies are coming back through a time warp portal in the Bermuda Triangle. They’ve all been dead since the Rapture.
President Rapture made a deal with Savage Space Aliens from the Savage Future to Return the Rapture-d through the Rupture in the Oceanic vacation land where all America went to die, Pre Rapture.
As a bonus he made an extra Eternity in the Cozy-Chair Heaven by selling advertising rites. And the Martyred, who, further enraged by having half the promised virgins turn out to be boys and fat men, Are Zombilng out of the Space hole off the Miami Coast are percolating into your living room, oozing rotten viscous-ness along already molded over brick work in the foundation where the spider crickets work out to classic heavy metal ballads played on tinny old Casio Pianos.
President Verb, P{resident Mouth Hole and President Rapture are all triading their spiritual essences into stock optioned Brains Food.
Oh, I AM sorry you waited so long.
But keep your fingers in the icing and We PROMISE you’ll get heaps of jiggly gelatins to goo into the gobhole.
Oi Vey Everybody!

Dollly's zombies are coming to Tallahasee

UNLESS THEY START MAKING SENSE

Poker Face

For the century it’s innovation. For the following, the creatures make lists like toes of forgiveness. Thursday we went to the market for mounds and mounds of cold gray Hammocks.
Tuesday is the orphan in the weeds gnawing one of her own legs. A crawly mouth intent on trepidation.
There’s a good reason not to let the baby’s go for the mother’s sake. More zombies is more meat. And the baby in the window’s not renounced yet. Not like the fog growing, incandescent space dust, space fodder. Your ambiguous intention.
Toes, benighted, delinquent, I intend for this to shape up knifely, Er nicely.
Monday is the bluest day, the bluest meat in the corridor, swinging. I’m disentangling from my politics of decency so the children born dead can be used as the soldiers of the new army, Precambrian and gooey.
You know.
December writhing its days. Friday like a corpse swung rope. The rope of doom on the lean out like morning, cold and quibbling. You’re morning, insistent, rotten peaches on the bowl of your knuckles. The introverted hand, it’s bumps a boil of rotten flesh, flesh tigers and the night.
All night.

Knee-jerk ziombies watch PBS

Emo up and the permafrost forever melting, you fucking asshole. Alan Alda on PBS described the permafrost melting, yes he told me so, you fucking asshole. Once the permafrost melts, you see, it keeps melting and melts down forever to it’s own core. Twelve million years of carbon matter buildup that was frozen is released. Is released, you see…into the atmosphere. All that dinosaur poop and plant matter, but no, you don’t believe in dinosaur poop that old. I’m sorry. No, you don’t believe in dinosaurs. But I believe in Hawkeye and I say Alan Alda is to be trusted, yes, and that permafrost is melting, and those glaciers covered in ancient mosses are disappearing in our ignorance, and that you are an asshole. Yes, I believe in Alan Alda, and I believe what Hawkeye told me, that you, you stupid asshole are doing it right now. With your stupid car. Making everything disappear beneath us. Under the Kyoto treaty and everything you don’t know about it, you ignorant fuck. Hear this: Republican zombies on the march, will tow the party line, and you will follow it up the lane with your car. Right now while you sleep, tomorrow with your stupid, fucking car. Your beloved car up and down to the store, up to Canada, up past Alaska, up to the permafrost, and guess what, eventually back down to you. Cause Alan Alda told me so. And Alan Alda is to be trusted. And he and I will kick your ass, if we ever get the chance, we lanky liberals together, you stupid fucking asshole.

God is Sleep and Sleep is God and There is No Sleep in this House.

It wasn’t the eye of the giant squid, it wasn’t the truck on I-81 that almost obliterated the Blancett family name, with Baby May squalling in the back. It was the headlights scanning through the curve in Amherst county illuminating the undead. Do their eyes shine red on a county road like a rambling possums? Yes I think they do. The curve, the truck’s lights in an arc, twenty of the slow hunger, there, wandering the field under whatever moonlight there is. Wandering upright toward the road in whatever suits and costumes that held them aloft previously. Say County commissioner. Waiting to drag us, you and me, down into the scrub of those clear cut Virginia woods. Stupid scrubs where the super slacked off and the front-end loader cleared out clean up to 460. Out 460 up to Amherst county. So stupid, banal and obscure and forever we might lie.