EYE TEN

Asleep on the road
Mile-marked agitation, eye droop
Looms. Somewhere market shares

Are investigated, bet on, overrun
With rat revenge,
Outer space shudders

At the thought of carnage, what

Could have been a radiation jet
Liner cutting time out of the sky

Nightlong, across
The ocean

Overture, spawn, wreckage
What’s left are scraps dogs fight over

The trucks heap themselves in defeat
Just from looking

I stop off for gas, the dying cities
Gulp for air. I don't know how to

Think about this. Dawn is a frown
Of ferocious sky. I don't know

How to think.

Let's Have A War

Dishwasher Utopia

Dismembered insects
All along the sink basin,

Sludge in the caulking you’ll
Never get out.
Quick inspiration

To drawbridge knife.

The ants are escaping along my arm
I’m only just dead
To this grief: The world’s
Unfixable.
I dream it unhinged

The tide is roaring somewhere
You’ll see it. You. In your
Apron marked with spear points.

Zeitgeist Franchise

Supreme haze on a leafy
Sidewalk. Zero abstraction

And wood smoke to beat
All increments.

The hedge is a deteriorating measure
Just as parking is liable

The zone of leaf-blowing
Increments total

Bashfulness over the squirrel.
Her nests are abbreviating.

The price tag’s showing
On dig shit. This dream

Is a carnival heaven.

Transcendent Apartment Complex

Only the blond leaf buds
Despair at the frost.

For us it’s investments in baggies
And hoods for the war effort

That crawls up the tree bark
Gnawing impressions of city

Streets and names like Bandwagon.

You get me a pair of hypodermic
Bluejeans. You get me.

Get me
Out of this place.

I don't remember anything I don't have to, anymore.

Motorcycling in East Tennessee 2

I can run most of those curves about 50 plus these days, in the high end of fourth gear, and I’m afraid to run them any faster. I figured I knew what I was doing when the locals couldn’t keep up in their shitbox accuras or beater Toyota pickups anymore. However I’ve nearly ground off both heels on my boots and I can always tripod the front wheel off the tarmac should I plant a footpeg hard enough in a turn, then we get to find out what a highside is like. There’s the gravel trail left by the quarry trucks headed out the Rogersville highway, the occasional sandy washout on the one stretch of 208 headed to Erwin, there’s no phone service on just about anywhere, and I’ve never seen a police vehicle. Should I wreck, I’m in god’s hands with god’s children with wife and two kids back home, back down the mountain.

They used to be dirt tracks, these roads, winding the easiest path through mountain passes and whoever’s farm they bordered. Laid down when there was no way or money to cut through the rock. Laid down with horses and carts, intended for horses and carts. Running the length of the creek that had always been the flat land. The valley, the holler in the mountain’s shade. Running those roads in fourth gear, you are moving through a world of living geometry. Everything is active, the clutch, the brake, accelerate, downshift, your shoulders bearing down. Keep your head level and sight through the turn. Meditate, always, on traction. These are not hills, they are lumps of hills piled against one another, built of ancient rock, rubbed granite, perhaps. Every facet of landscape is transformed into a geometrical problem that you solve as you arrive at it. Including the dogs.

I don’t know what kind of rock it is, except that if you glimpse it, therein lies the root of the smokies. Those houses, with worn grey siding, sit atop those stones, wedged under those mountains. Goat straddled in the yard, rubbed up through the turf and covered in moss. Hidden under moss and pine in the laurel grotto overhang. The rock forming the nubby spine of this road that you ride. The machine under you being the hand rubbed against its crippled form. The hard shove after coming in hot through a turn. Whatever violence occurs on its surface, it is the rock that forms this high Appalachia, it is the rock that shocks clear the creek, and the stones within the creek. Appalachia enough to make you weep.

I see a bad moon rising

rope-a-dope

What Zombie you knob? Aren’t you just looping, that is, walking in ignoble circles. To the supermarket, to the mall, to the god forsaken ruby Tuesday? Perambulate this, drip, drip like the most anticipated of tortures, or a cup-o-Joe. I just orbit out, cold cold hyperspace and then the come on back, loop de loop. It’s a fact of mankind that a shamble is just a loop of rope, ropadoped, the knocking pipes –who’s knocking, is it you god? Fingers finding purchase – around the neck.

The Collapsible Frink just collapsed in a heap.

I Got a Six Pack, and Nothing To Do

May sometimes sleeps to “Sounds of the Womb:” some other mother’s blood rushing,

her throbbing heart. Mary can’t sleep with it on,

because of the door off the kitchen where the killers will enter.

The line of Food City cashiers keeps gaining weight,

even the young ones, though some of them still look cute.

What the fuck is wrong with me? I’m three inches thick,

surrounded by meat in the meat section, peering out through these sockets.

A Whoozit For Mr. Snodgrass

MisAntropic Needle

Evening in her dress lifts the hem
For a peep at thunder, maybe rain.

Hope for the tomb, the laughter
Comes over a loud speaker

Installed near your armpit.
Quietly, quietly,

It is necessary to interrupt.

One point in the distance
Is a huddle of laundry
Dry, rotting, perverse.

Mellow Out Or You Will Pay.

1. The mass under my skin,
which on some days passes
for muscle; miles of spaghetti
and meat sauce; strung around bone.

2. Once, during dinner, before we knew
about the tumor, I watched the line of my wife’s jaw
moving, and suddenly became afraid.

3. Whatever throbbing meat it is that makes up my heart.

You're Gonna Have To Move Yer Kubota

This Ain't No Way to Get to Heaven

Buzzbomb cornered at the 7-11

Dual tower arrow symplegma

Huckleberry Onward, Lisa Thi

Because you are a true seeker. Because
We live this life by what we leave behind.

Massive Plurals

You a hear the sound when its working
Which means I’m on to you. If everything
Were going well, you wouldn’t hear
That constant rasp of pants. The machine
Breaths to make noise, not for air. It wants
You to know its there and functioning.

Otherwise the leaves layered in autumn’s
Copulation wouldn’t give up to airy convection,
Sodomite leaves!

As I look at the scene, of brown leaves, gray
Sky, some motion of finger-y branches unclothed
To the cold, the photo of it in my mind
Fades to a backdrop on a pinball machine,
Scores amass to decay and fucking leaves

And that ball bearing is trying to break
The glass, to dot a bloody hole in my head.

The Dark

This is a machine we bred between us.
Is that distressing? It has arms and legs
--Are you frightened-- and hair. I made it
to be unsympathetic. You made it to
look out for you, and to be there when you
cried. I gave up my organs for it, liver-ish
and eye holes, you gave up most digits
with the most euphoric hopes, for how well
it would do. It’s walking now toward us.
What a dreadful cloud, the summary
of our parts for a bond between us. I hear
it stammering, its got your teeth. I hear its
footstep. Its got my resistance to action.
So wonderful, its putting together a whisper

Last Stanza Pulling out of Fuckoff Station

Wait, didn't you hear it? This is a repress...

Here’s the deal. I wouldn’t piss on Oregon Hill if it were on fire.
And I don’t care about you. Have you met Henry or May?
You make my life harder than it is, and you’re gone. Gone.
Sure, you’re making art, and sure you’re plenty cool
But you don’t have the kids. I’m thinking about today
And I’m thinking about tomorrow and how exactly I am
Going to get from here to there. Diapers for May. Words Henry
Can spell. The rest of you can go to hell.

Can you hear me?

Sardonic Mesmerism

Opening on the watershed where
construction cranes bequeath holes
to landscapes like prehistoric esthetic
enforcement officers, a single celled
insect consumes the poisons of a million
abusive mother in laws. Other miscues
assemble at a beach head made of laundry
to discuss the reprehensibility of taking shape,
of becoming skeletal and therefore demeaning
to the spirit of formless shame. “We creep
upon them,” a jetty of sound escaping lips
“If they obey one another.” Everything that
ever wore a bikini dissolves into air. Only
discarded hubcaps are left to circle endlessly.

Oh tender word
You’ve escaped the guards and their skillful
Penmanship,
Also the foundation of words
Themselves are truncating
To the example of maps

To the unfolded edge which prevents
The passage through

The brain blood ensemble playing
Smooth tones

Snapping blood vessels.

There was this,

And there was this,

AbneGates

We, enlarging, insinuate the rats.
All through the side-streets awkward
Personalities resharpen their credentials
Toothing conscription over
Happy-like self demarcations
Of the what’s-in-fashionable bible’s
Pleasant recreations of a you-baby

Attitude and other inklinged overhangs.

What a March-belly reach around. Get your teeth
Ready for the left-overs

It’s all inside, it’s true to the bit,
The entrance and the squalor of
Abnegation and doubt you pegged on me,

The chewed on wood of my self interest parade
loosens in the hightide.

It’s true rats. I made it all up
And when the waters rose you came
Scurrying to remind me
How bourgeoisie my hut looks.

Burning inverted babel flesh fork Adam & Eve

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome David Diaz

Consider The New Orleanean Artist, Years Ago, on Pine Street

Consider the struggle.
Will you embrace his return, Richmond, you dirty bitch?

Change, Yeah Nothing Stays The Same; Unchained:

And you hit the ground running.
Between the merlot and the winstons,
My mouth tastes like meat.

In the marshmallow time before sleep
What I have for muscle passes for frozen steak,
Not as cold but red and just about as bendy.

What gets me, if the fuckers come in
Through that window and the Snods get it
As well, sure they eat, but would they
Pick up the blog? Would all my tools rust?

It goes like this: Eeuuurgh. Aheh-aheh.
Gwarrsssssgh. Gnar gnar aroo, with
Maybe a gem like “I can feel myself rot.”
Everything else is waste, and that’s
The true crime: there's no art with zombies.
Zombies have no trade except meat,
And I hope I taste like a stack of turds by then.

Yes, This Man is A Jackass

goin to johnson city git me a burritohaircut

Lamb Of God Is Saving America

Richmond, oh blessed Richmond

Yes Virginia, There Are Such Things As Monsters

I only met the guy once, but I talked to her a couple of times back when she was above Exile on Grace street. No, me and Mary talked to them both once, walking down main, up by chimborazo park, and someone told us later who they were. Then the Newspaper told us later, years later, no, somebody on the internet before that, just a month ago, told us who they were. They were the butchered Richmond family, and they had always been the same as us. Artists in the transitional neighborhood, artists who eventually had kids. Struggled around money, saved some up and made a house around themselves, made a life around their art. Made their kids around their art. Laughed and ruined pasta with so-and-so, had some wine, the kids playing together.

And then the monsters came in through the front door.

I have no right to be writing this, no I have every right. It is a hideous event and there is no way to form words around it.

A small atomic device has exploded off Forest Hills Avenue and the fallout will unspeakably erode those hit by it’s poisoning radius for the rest of their lives.

Unspeakable throughout the thing’s long history, crippled maples somehow dying against that sad avenue, the cops who took them out eventually passing away. The story untold from one generation to the next, but passed, unspeakable and forever hideous, nonetheless.

Ferberization

It is the lime green light over the aloe plant in the basement that keeps it alive as there is not snow outside quite yet. My six week old daughter cries inside her bassinet as a matter of course, as a matter of breathing, hik hik, and I am waiting for her to sleep. I insist that I am not a monster. I pick her up and hold her to me to quiet her breathing. Then put her back in. She ramps it back up, over ten minutes, and though I am patient, she becomes a thing again, a shrieking animal with a mouth. A thing that my will, as I am an only animal, only wants to quiet. In Ovid’s Metamorphoses there is a king who goes mad and swings his infant, head first, against a wall. There was a goddess who caused this for purposes that I don’t care if I ever remember. I am no king and I recognize no god’s will against me. A king wouldn’t know his child well enough to play Johnny Cash singing “Darling Companion” and sing backup to June, dancing with her in his arms. Dancing forever with her in his arms. And no matter what happens, today or tomorrow, no god could ever interfere with a man singing, no matter how suffering, beside those two, forever singing below the steps of the Appalachians.

Never Trust A Hippy

macanudo

Orangutan: Mr Alex, don't you think being an artist is pretty pretentious?

Mr. Alex: Urggh, blaaggh.

Just Before Sleep I Feel Like A Frankenstein Monster Built Out of Stale Marshmellows

Me: Hey you should check out the blog, we've got an awesome picture of Randy's new scooter.
Mr. Alex from New Orleans: Yeah, what was the name of that again?
Me: The uhm, shambling darkness project.
Mr. Alex: ....
Me: What?
Mr. Alex: Don't you think that's a pretty pretensious name for a blog?
Me: It's about zombies!
Mr. Alex: I think you should change it to the Gary Shandling Darkness project.

http://www.pscelebrities.com/al.html

SHADOW:So what was the first political activity that you were ever involved with?
LEWIS:I don't know. Probably when I shit on the grass in Prospect Park, I don't know. I don't know what that means. What is a political activity? What does it mean?

SHADOW: And people would resist?
LEWIS:Well obviously. And unions were created. We used to have a saying: "If you don't get the asses of the masses out in the street, forget it." And you get enough of them out there, the ruling class gets scared. That's the only thing they're afraid of, is numbers. Numbers! See, one thing you have to understand. There's very few people understand, especially people who deal in outlaw newspapers and magazines. The ruling class is smarter than you, and they're more creative. And if you forget that lesson, you go down the drain. Because if they weren't, they wouldn't be around as long as they have been and as strong as they have been. It's not an accident. Not an accident. Never underestimate your opponent. They'll tell you that if you're a fighter. Never underestimate. You can poke fun at 'em, you can do satire, but they work 24 hours a day. It's like Lord Acton said: "Power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely." I say that power works 24 hours to remain in power. Throughout history. Go back to kings, feudal times. The same thing. While you and I, here we're bullshitting, and then we go out: "Tompkins Square, blah, blah, blah..." Their fucking machine works 24 hours a day, man. It grinds, it grinds. Otherwise they don't stay in power, they topple.

deservings

Everyone knows zombies are all that’s good of consumerism, all that’s left of the buying mind. Everyone also knows zombies don’t drive, that if they could they’d just hunt you down, run you down with the pick-up, the presidential Lariat. Everyone knows if they could they’d have guns too, but it’s good because all they can remember is the buying habit and happy-day trips to the gun shop with paw, that, or the wal-mart bullet market. So it should come as no surprise that the vehicle of our destruction should come on dark wings, commercial wings, syrupy mall-mind, vespa, vespa, vespa,
oh Christ, buy it already.

Godspeed You Black Emperor,

Nuttier than a squirrel turd,

and Heaven Hang the Consequences.

Grandpa Munster, Lifelong Anarchist, Died This Week

But by being a vampire might he be reborn to rip open the throat of your local republican? Who will record his passing? Who will write the bibliography on his body of work? Some shit anarchist fuck-zine out of Williamsburg?
Studs Terkel is the only one, yes, and we should leave Studs Terkel alone. The man is old and has given us enough.

Have you been reading your Studs Terkel lately, asshole? No?
Too busy with the Drudge report, down there in Tennessee?
Too busy with the Colbert Report? You forgot about the flag of Catalonia flying. You forgot about the Aspidistra. The man taught you, on the subway, and you forgot his name just now.
You forgot about art after the bit with the planes flying into the buildings. He learned his art beneath planes flying into buildings.
Before the assholes all over the airwaves, there was the struggle, he said. The man made art during the struggle with assholes all over the airwaves. Assholes killing poets and burying them outside soccer fields.
Assholes manipulating railways, assholes bending thought and reason and history
into a brand new word. And the stupid word made law, but for this man skewering it.
For the entirity of his life, and that was the body of his work, the body that he sacrificed, the body that he gave for you and me. Orwell
Without the Animal Farm, Orwell without 1984,
Orwell, a lanky young man striding through Spain, with no year, fighting a war that he believes in.

Destitutions

It’s serious, you bloat, the finger fetish
I’ve cultivated spurns elegantly
One choice, two choice, the button pusher

Tap dancing chronicler of the ATM
And her forlorn breast-eye-mirror
Force field of contusion on the world

See it in its bowl, request denied, withdraw
To vacuum grocery store, the bats dropping
Here, Christ, even with witnesses

Ordering things about is a hit on the head
With bats in finery, in scope dashed
Through to external punctuality

Throw up an elbow to the outside world
Because, whatever happens, save the hand.

This blog might mean something after we're dead.

And perhaps, if life is true, we might walk again. To skulk after our children and make them crazy-er. To graze in an Amherst county field might be stupid, yet to dream, but if our blessed milk might give more life, then sure howdy.

I think I might hate my parent's computer more than I hate my parents, because the keyboard is awkward and the television is always on.

Please ask Mrs. Christine Snodgrass to put the Dr. Phill on the Oedipal connotations on all of this. Git-R-Dun for her. Because it is her birthday and I love her like a queer cowboy on a Montana mountaintop git-a-way.

I mean Gitt-urr-dun like any ignorant shit that ever screwed his cousin in a trailer and needed to git his dingle dragged off by a number nine hitch. Get-her-done for her.

Because she strives everyday, for herself, for her art, and for her family. Especially; For her art, and for her.

For her pretty mommy's hair. And for her Patience. And her love.

Ah crap this used to be a poem. Zombies zombies zombies! Here at the last minute!

Zombies loves Chrissy2006 yeeauurghh-yee-ha!

ClayClay the Brokeback Homo Cowboy

Conduit

of behavior, of folding pages, of drifting emergencies and wood chips. In the window a carved ship complete with articulated rigging monitors the imagination of a shelf and all its descendants. You may ask if this is correct, if your sharing my anxieties is infinite. Should I call or not? Here you worship the chance light through a drifting ship. I can call but it is futile. Whatever I say is a trap of meaning. I am drowning in wood. Outside an electrical storm has risen from nothing. I contemplate nothing until I am submerged again, reaching to a passing ship. The pages crease. They are made of wood. The machinery runs. Power consumes the remission of sloth.

Epiphany

I can somehow walk and think, and looking at my boots, that is art. There is the forty hour week, and there is money, which both can kill art. Republicanism kills art. War murders art. There is the chattering darkness all around us. In work and in war. You’ve taught me all my life: Art is war, yet I’ve decided we can win. So let us wage our lives against.

Fernandina Beach Libertarian Women’s Tennis League

Because we are not striving for actually anything,
We are enjoying ourselves. We are winning.
We want to keep it.

pickles and mustard

You’re wrong, you’re decay means everything to me. I’ve built a fiasco of a deck down in North Florida for my parents. Am going back tomorrow, to build it; out of need for money. Went down with Henry, just me and him. Because there is no use for art in our great country so we go and build decks. “I want momma,” he sez. Almost every night. Because I dragged him four hundred miles for money, because an artist father always needs money from somebody. We all sit down on the porch steps eating Krystal hamburgers for lunch one day, I scrape the pickles and mustard off for Henry.

“You’ve got grey hair,” my mother said, astonished, still in her tennis skirt. “I can see it in the sunlight.” “Yeah, I got lots.” I say, and that’s all, because of the same truth that makes people stop behind school buses. Or else they don’t stop.

I am not a whining liberal and I will break your fucking nose if you call me that. I am a full grown American craftsman, doing my best to keep from dying.

Necrosis 1.1

A crisis in the upraised, I’m enjoying what’s coming down on my head. The treatment of my youth. Its hallways of hypnotized dilution. I watch it on TV for the reality. The shared grave. I make it up to me by not killing myself. What goes up comes together. It’s the primary rule of transmission: my decay is everything, except to you.

Unassuming

Either giving or eating, the teeth stay focused, dedicated to the knowledge of the impossible, for them, the teeth, it is the engulfed, the consumed. Love is to the masticated. The sky is overcast. In the city it is all the ruin of teeth. It is abutment, adjustment. Giving in to the blackmail of love, (How Useless?) I am engulfed by the sky, its limited potential for giving; I am dismembered to the knuckle, its exact placement.

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.