Against All Odds

Bleachface

The welding school instructor leaned

into his connection to show us just

how to pose for action. I was fat

as any of the others in attendance.

Before this I was a clown for kid’s

parties, oil faced and woven hair.

Before that baskets of night

watching trucks sleep with stars.

There was some cold then. This

because of the sex appeal

of a television commercial, I’m

salving the hot end of my torch,

tack arc and blinder beams to not

look into. If I learned this I would

be complete and successful.

It is the clown’s dream to wear

regular clothes, but also a key

could fit into the rotten teeth

I see my grandfather smiling

at me through, a slot which loosens

up a man’s place to dwell next

to a stove with a drink in his

heart like a knife, holding two

parts together so as to seam

down a night cloth-dark, and duct

tape silenced to anything, become

hard cornered, holding

together an ended comfort.

When it was my turn the torch banged

a little heavier than I expected

and melted a corner of my glove

which I immediately brought up

to my nose to smell and the goo

tacked on there and seared out

olfactory futures for a good ever.

Then my eyeballs went

clown white and sizzled, basket

beard went up to smell like

burger king, all flesh and pot

to piss on. And just so, tight

jeans gave me over to the door

locked forever to the right edge,

no ship rivets in my future, no

offshore deep water money

making, no ever in the end of

disappointment my grandfather’s

smile sealing up, all snarl

after a sear of bourbon

hard going down, trucks through

the ice, no ship, just laughter

grinding along with me, burnt eye

never seeing you again, burnt

halter-top exposé of retina, lip

disorder not speech, hairline

out mode of the done up, my line,

your line, cracked out the get-go

It’s not time enough, clownish

forbearance doesn’t cut it, this

gauge won’t melt it out, witch’s

longing to transcend. The course

I failed but made it to the hospital

where a nurse polishes my inside

out until it made a gloss and can

breath the night, porcelain edged.

::

Look Alive

Although there are roller coasters, a pair of tiger cubs

at the gate distract the girls before we even get to the toilets,

post interstate, traveler’s dementia, souring sweet air

over the spilled blue Icee, there is only an allofasudden

standing in line to ride the Hangman or the Rattler

all of the water park spred below,

each delectable flavor of death the coasters serve up

here and there the wasted trailer

leans its hulk in a direct line to some distant

industry. America’s amusement parks,

strands of garbage and stalls of animals, milk squash,

yards of water logged bread,

feast of the gull and pigeon, ants forever in line

the sweltering preamble to the Swamp Thing,

a feet down hanging coaster that’s main thrill

are a pair of overfed alligators

confusing the children with even more threats. Just

this morning words comes of a teenager

decapitated at another park, other deadly portend through

the mists of America where we all stand

sweating to board the Anaconda or the Magnum,

force of doom, the rising up to taste. Surely

it is early man, not the zombies, rising up from the

water-park’s Lazy river, slouch shouldered,

wet and flavored with the taste of Band-Aids and urine,

the heated ooze and swirl of gestating bacteria

here is our origin and our doom, fat upon the inner tube

spinning away from the world’s regret.

.

If there's no such thing as a victimless crime,

what happened to this man?

Keep Swimming

Mace Windu,

Dressed in his Jedi robes, led me down a narrow back passage in my brain I didn't even know was there. It opened onto a hot room with low hanging cage-lights and concrete walls. There was a pit in the center with a concrete ramp, and I followed him down, it was hot and close like a boiler room. Stacked like cord-wood in one corner of the pit were life-size versions of lemon-flavored sour-patch kids, large bodies almost entirely devoid of form, piled like bodies. They were, they were bodies. I could almost taste their sweet gritty coating, salivating at the memory of their flavor in my mouth. There were maybe fifty or more. I asked Samuel L. Jackson-Mace Windu what could they possibly be for, lying there like a new sugary holocaust? He explained in a baritone like was like the ocean at night, they were my bad histories, the deep old memories, the ones that hurt. He asked me did I want them, or was I in fact done? I didn't even recognize most of them, none of them had faces anyway, I said no, I wanted them to go away. He told me okay. He told me they would dissolve, slowly, over the course of two days.

I Always Wanted

to be a drunken pole-cat out in the yard preachin' to the hogs.

Ready Made

Here is the Black Dahlia’s body,

the two halves of her corpse split

into a darkness upon the field.

It is not you but the poem

whose face is invisible behind her hair,

as though it has been erased. Tutelary

image of a True Crime world.

It is not you but the poem

whose mouth goes on smiling too far.

Thus what seems like nature is cracked

skin upon a stretched armature.

But see? Her starfish is shaved. As sure

as the Mona Lisa’s moustache.

We go from a bright room to the dark

and feel the light creep close for a touch.

This is the mouth of the poem.

There is only the idea of seeing. The body,

field-dumped, framed in grass and road side.

See her turn over, minotaur to the grain?

This is the poem getting up, coming through

black and white history, her two halves

tortured by memory, the same way love

goes on, if we remember. It is not

you looking through the peephole, but

the poem, posed for the show. See?

It is the poem who is eating you.

::

A Useful Illustration

from John

Nike A Go-Go

Behold He Is Risen

postzombie

The zombie is the zombie that always ever was

the zombie. To have any less of the zombie is

an erasure if the zombie and the self that imagines

the zombie, thus an erasure of all of this, the bees

and the begonias too. This zombie is the different

cities of the zombie that are required of the zombie

always ever after the city of the zombie, upon

the island of the zombie. Not to worry. This

confusion is built upon the reaction of a body

slammed against a wall. Only this wall, indeed,

always ever after this wall. This zombie, which

always ever was is a force of violence that also

was always there, reviling, mutating into vast

flung functions, a killing of the without from

the within, inside time which contains the this

which is what I am inside of and vastly mutating

out of with a violence of categorical patterns

which is the survival of history. Thus is the zombie

which was ever in a city always in this city,

this Midwestern, Atlantic calm mountainous

deserted seaside of a cancer upon history. Always

ever wasting the potential for violence upon

the icicles dispersing parades of forever zombies.

Splut

Anasazi Zombie

I’d been expecting it for so long that when I finally saw

the zombie as I mowed the lawn in my old sneakers

I almost had a heart attack and died.

The old mower puttered off and some crazy silence

gripped me by the chest, the automatic shutoff of the heart

kicking up some dust and clicking into the azaleas.

Art condescends to life so easily, that zombie

shambling out of a movie into my makeshift life

only to hit the kill-switch.

I’d always wanted to be a painter,

but now it was too late, the only thing to paint

are stretching hands, and without an audience,

no real reason to paint them.

Last week I warned my daughter about snakes

in the backyard. Now we’ll all have to get on the roof

or try to drive to a prison. Razor-wire

keeps the bad thoughts inside, so my therapist says

every time I tell him about the zombies coming.

If we could make it to the desert we could live on a mesa

and drink cactus juice, hollow history out of rock walls

and paint our own hands as warning signs to the future,

stop sign held up to history. I’d like to see you paint that,

maestro. Then after a while in the caves we’d hear

a voice coming, the great spirit, drying our tears

and carrying us away through the wind in our mouths.

My heart starts to beat again. That was a close one.

Look again, there’s no zombie. Only my neighbor is mowing

his grass just like a mirror of me, and is he clutching

his chest or is he clutching at me. I smile and wave.

Maybe I’ll go inside and lie down in the grave for a while.

:::

Future Statues

After the zombie uprising

there will be statues of them in the park.

Of course we will have to make them

because they won’t have the dexterity.

We will have to sneak them in

without being eaten. Such is the risk.

The nudes will be noble and the horses

will all be on their sides instead of rearing.

We will make the rules, a zombie with its arm

raised will mean the statue was made by

a family member who hadn’t been eaten,

a zombie on all fours will mean that the family

managed to brain her before she got any of them,

and of course, a platter of severed heads

splashing in a fountain will mean that an entire

community had been killed only on suspicion

of infection. This one will be placed low

so that any new zombies traversing the square

will trip over the bronze heads.

Once we’ve gotten a lid on the whole thing

we can come back and arrange the markers back

into strip malls and car washes. Until then

Sculptor will be the most prized of all jobs.

BloodSnot

Query

The zombie is a member of the collective

answer to the question of what it is really

that’s for dinner. Not are you reborn in Christ,

or do you like the rain, not even aren’t you

comfortable now down in the casket inside

the poured concrete tomb with all that fluid

that’s supposed to dissolve your skin so as

not to take up any of that, ahem, space?

The zombie is always foregoing Santa Claus

in favor of the labor union, showing up

at the pearly gates to tend the lawn, trim

the hedge but receive no citizenship.

The door is double latched, the faces

behind the curtains turn around quickly

so as not to be noticed. The zombie is

always after heaven’s eternal tuna sandwich.

The zombie is the elephant in the room

when the sky is brilliantly falling.

The zombie is a developmentally

inaccurate reaction to the lump in your

throat. The smiling, nodding answer.

Paul Celan comes back from the Dead to Eat the Brains of Martin Heidegger

After a night of cold schnitzel and the warm dregs

of a pitted fire, Martin walks indirectly through

the front door of his affluent Mench Huas.

You can see his posterior, overly fitted

in gray slacks. A bit of a show off. The bare

trees do not judge him and he frankly poses,

one enormous yellow stripe down the front

of his sweater, as though he is without sin.

From the nineteen sixties Paul Celan

dredges himself out of the Seine.

Some city workers are witness to his

messianic emergence. In the interest

of language they are spared.

Martin takes a spa and forgets his Nazism.

A woman of indifferently blond depths

rubs his back, his penis. Martin imagines

a shower head leaking insects then lurches

back into the sunlight as he comes.

Dogs bark at and nip little chunks from

Paul Celan’s latest manuscript as he wanders

into the black forest, the hounds of hell

he fends off with a posed arm held out

like the general of a failed army

everyone still wants do like, despite the wars.

Martin sees Paul coming down the walk.

He goes to meet him but he doesn’t want to take

Paul’s out stretched hand, Martin still

wont knowingly touch a Jew.

Paul takes Martin’s head in his two hands

and breaks a tooth as he sinks in to Martin’s skull,

the spurt of blood, so many millennial ideas

escaping into the crisp German air.

When questioned about it later, the grounds keeper

said he saw poetry murdering logic with its teeth,

while the horrified Unsayable began to

to open their dark holes and speak.

Zombie as Personal History

How openly he shows off his goods,

intestine bobbing next to his penis,

pants no more than relics to modesty.

He has one eye, the other is an open room

that fills with rain or seeds or falling

leaves this time of year.

He was obviously bitten on the cheek

first but then one of them got him

by his tummy fat and pulled hard,

the hinge of it is an open door to

scientific observation and some

insect larvae. He is an opened house

and his stairway is falling to pieces.

His kidneys, those art room sinks

of the body are clogged with bone

matter, as though the sculpture teacher

went nuts with the remains of his class

and shoved handfuls of little David

statues down the drains. This zombie

is a school house art room where

the teachers first slept with each other

then were betrayed by the failure

of children’s minds to produce art,

to lump together a horse, or smudge

a tree, sure, this zombie’s empty eye

could be an olive with a dab of white

to give it a painted gleam, this zombie

could have been several kinds of diner

parties held by aspiring artists before

they gave in to the pressure of domestic

life, the coffee table, a couch to match

the tree light, wicker chairs on the porch

and a strange man coming near.

Lion Tamer

So many mornings of television they thought I was wasting.

Now is the time when we all need to have paid attention

to the human fly. Practice at scurrying up walls

could help humanity evolve away from the zombie hoard

which of course used to just be gawkers hoping

that dumb sonofabitch would fall.

If we had a set of suction cups ready we could hang

out on the ceiling, watch the late show upside down

just out of reach of the swiping hands.

Or if I had that lion no one would let me have

I could use it to protect me from the zombies. Unless

of course the lion would turn in to a zombie

then it wouldn’t be such a great idea. Or if the lion

decided to eat me because all the other meat was spoiled.

All that television has prepared me for these times, put

my head in the lion’s mouth just as it yawned

on the rooftop and the understanding is her canine

nicked my jugular and blood filled her mouth like from a cup

which is the right and wrong of boredom, for a lion.

I see myself on television waiting for the cure, Dr. Serum

making a cameo from the crowd, his spear point a syringe.

Texas Beach

Meet The Poets

How to Tell a Body Apart

Osprey and raccoon leave fish carcasses

up in the skinny Australian pines. A tourist

drags her skirt in the gentle surf of the bay.

One large condo in the distance

is completely on fire.

In order to feel safe, we sleep in the trees,

swatting at mosquitoes. An Abuela

comes down the bridge half way, calling

for her sons. The hem of her nativity

dress has dragged through blood.

Summer clouds are like cakes.

They do not promise to stop torture

or to bring humanity back. If you see

an osprey with a fish it is a sign of prosperity.

In last year’s spring parade, between the pirate

ship tossing green and silver beads and the police

motorcade, one man walked alone

as a skeleton to protest the war.

He walked like his legs didn’t work,

pretending to lose his balance.

Children threw rocks at him until their parents

smacked them. At the end, the pastor’s son, playing

Resurrected Jesus walked through the trash

and dirtied his gown.

The Abuela raised up to beg heaven

and a wind dropped a dead fish into her hands.

She screamed and the tourist, missing one eye

and half a cheek turned her head

towards the sound of birds.

::