Blessed Black Wings

Black Rhino

While Getting Yr Doctorate, We Steals Yr Women

High on Fire

This monster patterned after learned dysfunction,
Cells born of electricity, humming with electricity.
This monster is a trap-root buried, speared straight down.
Days of hornets stitched across his back, run him through the woods,
Set the dogs on him. High on fire, this monster staggers toward the mob,
Lurks the perimeter of the elementary school, carries his daughter,
Three years old, on his back under trees. The closed fist of his ribs continue,
This monster engulfed in fire. Train the cameras on him.
Forgets to pack sandwiches for the pool, tends daily to the equipment.
Observe monster family systems: rides quiet in the truck
Beside his quiet daddy, falls from space into a boiling Atlantic,
Slows his truck at lunch by the playground to maybe glimpse his son.
This monster shaves slowly in his tub, his own little girl pours water
Over his head, this monster weeps.

Brother in the Wind

--High on Fire

Art Is Your Enemy

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.