Ratchet Scroll

Deathmetallyrics #1

Horse radish despair
carbuncle function
depleted

Deathmetallyrics: you are my Fenric, my wolves of Fenric I am make you
corn swans and then I die.

Revenge Boat Revisited

It's not that bad, this reunion tour, divorced, deadbeat.
Not having referred to myself as a poet for ten years.
This is not a website, it's a distraction, it is a dream, recurrent.
Crawled from the swamp and writhing along your morning route
Curled under the wild hibiscus as it blooms white and prefect
The size of a fist, sprung straight from the mud.
This is not a swamp, it's the hospital where I work.
I'm sitting in the lobby on break, along with the Bhutanese
That populate the kitchen. My eyes are closed, their language
Washes over me. None of this matters, really. 
I'm only leaving this here for my children to find
Much, much later, when our bodies are no longer our own,

Trust me, I know what I'm doing.

You've Come a Long Way, Baby

BOOM HUTCH

Stelarc

My high school art teacher is famous for suspending himself
with hooks from office ceilings and from high rise
window washing scaffolds. It’s hard not to live in his
shadow as he is also famous for being naked and painting
his body in the ash of cremated road kill. I always wanted
to live up to that but because he wasn’t my parent it didn’t
really matter anyway and if I fell short with my pen rubbings
of giant robots or a clutch of chickens beheaded by chainsaws
it was ok because he was older and famous already
and I couldn’t expect to be famous myself just by cutting
holes in my skin or reworking my neurons with old
used computer wiring. Heck, I don’t even know how to
wire or do electrical so I probably shouldn’t feel bad about
that either although if I really put my mind to it I could
learn to dance, lose weight or peal my skin back over my head
like one of those sex robots whose mouths are always open
in strange wonder. No, I suppose I won’t become a robot
like my high school art teacher. One time I saw someone
high up on a building who looked like they were going to jump
and I stared up with my mouth open in preparation for
horror or disgust or orgasm and I thought about my High
school art teacher and for a second I thought it might be him
up there getting ready to put an end to it all because art
had failed to remake man, or because truth really was relative
or whatever reason artists destroy themselves for, art I guess.
Then I thought I hoped it wasn’t, that it wasn’t anyone who
was really going to jump off there and splatter paint
the sidewalk, though it might have been interesting to try
with a robot filled with paint to simulate the world weary
feeling I get from robots or automatic doors or lift gates
that I think about at night before I go to sleep, how they
must be tired of going up and down or in and out over
and over without crying. But then it really wasn’t anyone
up there and I was glad because if it was my high school
art teacher then I wouldn’t have the chance to tell him
that I wanted to be meaningful or relevant but that I didn’t
have the courage to step off that ledge. I imagine him
smiling, his bald futuristic head wrinkling a little from that,
and saying it was often alright not to function correctly.
Then he’d walk out of my head on his giant spider legs.

Value Judgment

The café has a large window looking on to the street. A man at a booth is waving his arms dramatically to a woman who is invisible at this angle. One wants to go in and rescue her but in all likelihood it is another man who is in agreement with the gesticulator and would not look favorably on our interruption. We pass beneath mortar and brick opposite, as pigeons swirl through the cold looking for morsels, we have an urge to go in and stop the man’s talking. The world pushes urgently with its hands. The man has a thin moustache and oily skin. He is old and turning to dust as we pass, moving on to silence.

Canto Perilous

Cozy and flexed, my kitchen window
stretches a new found view, it affects
the whole house, makes snow or heaves
a humid afternoon. In the floorboards
a little water from the storm, a little
ocean with sea women, sea teeth, mermaids,

ambience of drowning, particular mermaids
disperse a toad’s evolution at a cashier’s window,
movies piecing together a glance at your little
leg, the tree you are staked to; which effects
ambulation’s variables, gains strength and boards
the little organ in its house until it heaves

out a burn victim from its vacuum’s heaving
breast, rescued at sea by the fleshy slip of a mermaid’s
tongue, the pulling hands, to the squalid boards
of her double wide, mold stains above the window,
its forest floor, the brown condemned effect
of the carpet, unhurried corkscrew, to her little

shivering fingers paused over little
buttons, to the shower of fuel, who heaves
rainbows of fuel in swampy obscurity, affecting
sallow mug shots in bashful pride like a mermaid
caught with her pants down in the window,
two the jagged sticks on her resurrecting boards,

wounds where dog’s put their ribs through boards,
out of restraint the scalpel sees its ancestry in little
hanging plastic casements. Scatter my windows
with the cold ladle, telegram the scalpel heaves
into ashes on a salad dressed in creamed mermaid
the cost of a family reunion. I am cold, my affects

wash up on the beach, undulating defects
rumpled in tide, spend a little time in boards
dress in my habits, the confiscated mermaids
wearing what the common folk worry little
about. You know we eat our children, heave
them like invasive species through the window.

See how the mermaids dress heaves with opinions?
Her little tide like breast holds back the boards,
gives the affect of falling into water

Canto Perilous

Cozy and flexed, my kitchen window
stretches a new found view, it affects
the whole house, makes snow or heaves
a humid afternoon. In the floorboards
a little water from the storm, a little
ocean with sea women, sea teeth, mermaids,

ambience of drowning, particular mermaids
disperse a toad’s evolution at a cashier’s window,
movies piecing together a glance at your little
leg, the tree you are staked to; which effects
ambulation’s variables, gains strength and boards
the little organ in its house until it heaves

out a burn victim from its vacuum’s heaving
breast, rescued at sea by the fleshy slip of a mermaid’s
tongue, the pulling hands, to the squalid boards
of her double wide, mold stains above the window,
its forest floor, the brown condemned effect
of the carpet, unhurried corkscrew, to her little

shivering fingers paused over little
buttons, to the shower of fuel, who heaves
rainbows of fuel in swampy obscurity, affecting
sallow mug shots in bashful pride like a mermaid
caught with her pants down in the window,
two the jagged sticks on her resurrecting boards,

wounds where dog’s put their ribs through boards,
out of restraint the scalpel sees its ancestry in little
hanging plastic casements. Scatter my windows
with the cold ladle, telegram the scalpel heaves
into ashes on a salad dressed in creamed mermaid
the cost of a family reunion. I am cold, my affects

wash up on the beach, undulating defects
rumpled in tide, spend a little time in boards
dress in my habits, the confiscated mermaids
wearing what the common folk worry little
about. You know we eat our children, heave
them like invasive species through the window.

See how the mermaids dress heaves with opinions?
Her little tide like breast holds back the boards,
gives the affect of falling into water