Poems in the key of KABLAM

[flaggwalkstheline]

Disemboweled in the shopping mall

All of almost spilled out today
After I handed my inked up job application paper
Filled with references and former employers names and proof of my citizenship
To the girl behind the starbucks counter
And she said through a mouthful of braces
“We’re not hiring right now but I’ll give this to the manager”
Everything nearly spilled out
All the rage which has built up inside me like plaque on unbrushed teeth
I imagined
(And I could see it too, like a drive in theater just above my nose)
Leaning my head over the tile counter
As if to give her a kiss
And biting her head off in one scissor motion chomp
And saying to one of her shocked coworkers as her spurting headless corpse collapsed on the cash register
“Now I KNOW there’s a job opening
Who else do I have to kiss to get it?”
Instead of even saying something witty or mean
I shoved it back down
Like a disemboweled person pushing their intestines back in
To buy more time
All my experience with violence comes from Hollywood
Tom Hanks firing at that german tank with a handgun at the end of saving private ryan
Even in fiction everybody wants to buy more time
And even though my eyesight occasionally tints red
I’ve never even been in a fight and know no pain beyond my own melodramatics
No pain no gain or maybe just no gain and plenty of pain
Clichés expand popcornish in my lard-streaked imagination
The coffee junkies behind me tapped their feet and scratched their arms waiting for me to move out of the way
I meekly said, “Thank you”
The espresso machine gurgled like a laugh track on an unfunny sitcom
I walked out into the rest of the 2 story shopping mall
Where a poster of a woman in a bra stared at me like a 30 foot tall big brother from a wall
Had the words
HELLO BOMBSHELL
Emblazoned across her chest in red letters
I hear them in head real sexy over the sound of crashing planes
HELLO BOMBSHELL
And from inside fudruckers I could hear a shamanistic chant proclaiming the bird is the word
A bald man dragged two shrieking mucous leaking children inside with him
One on each hand
And the mothers in public, they pull their children close to them if I walk within ten feet
Like I’m an unmuzzled dog without a metal leash around my finger
A fairy tale monster under the bed only around as reason to keep the kids in school
Is that all I’m good for now?
At the foodcourt the workers pop out like invisible robots to sweep away the trash
And then go back backstage or somewhere where nobody can see them
The hooks in deep kid either be gutted or go to sleep
And you aren’t gonna be able to push it out by eating potato chips and playing xbox
When I turned 13 years old
My mother sat me down and told me that now that I was a teenager
I was on my way to becoming a sex crazed immoral monster and how much of a shame it was that I wasn’t a girl
And now at the ripe old useless age of 20
I can’t look anyone in the eye and I step aside on the sidewalk to let anyone coming walk by
So yeah I’M the monster alright!
I wonder as I watch the plastic Christmas trees twinkle like fishhooks
If I’m alone in this
Or if everyone walks around pretending they aren’t disemboweled?
The postal service is letting kids send letters to santa claus in the north pole this year again
And the president is gonna give more money to the banks
So who’s propagating a bigger lie?
I hope I am
Alone in my loneliness because it’s nice to have at least one original idea going for you
The strapless plastic watch in my pocket reminds me that I have nowhere I need to go
Without me the wheels will continue to turn but while I’m here there isn’t anything left to burn
And while today feels thin and malnourished and the future remains incomprehensible
The past just keeps chewing and slobbering and getting fatter
I sometimes worry that eventually it will catch me in it’s flytrap teeth and every day will be yesterday
I hum a warped snatch of a beatles tune and look at chocolate truffles behind glass display cases longingly
“yesterday all my trouble seemed so far away, now I need to get some decongestant nasal spray”
And yesterday a homeless old person and I crossed the street at the same time
In between the painted white lines that say where it’s ok to walk but only when the white flashing sign says when
I couldn’t tell what gender he or she was
He or she wore a tattered muddy tarp for a coat and had dull tarnished eyes like beaten silver
And the edge of the tarp-cape flapped in the dioxide breeze and touched me briefly on the knee
Giving me a gypsy curse for sure
I could see myself mutating into a hag creature leering from the dumpsters
HELLO BOMBSHELL
But for now I’m young and broke my wallet has consumption
And the shopping mall’s display windows are tugging at it’s lungs
I’m young and useless except as a bedtime story so none of the children grow up to be me
Let me remind you that the bird IS the word but I’m not a bird just sickly and absurd
And I spent six out of my last 20 dollars on cheap hamburgers and fries
I sucked down their grease and realized I’ll never be close to the best
HELLO BOMBSHELL
All of it nearly spilled out today
But I shoved it back down the way a lazy person like myself will do with a small trashcan full of candy wrappers
HELLOBOMBSHELL
Airplanes are leaving streaks in the sky over the cities like skidmarks on grey underwear
On tables all over the civilized world
The cigarette butts sit cold and lonely in ashtrays until a genderless bony hand picks one up for a feeble fireless drag
And I can hear the sound of chewing
HELLO BOMBSHELL

[Jon]

*** Saving Private Ryan spoiler above.***

[flaggwalkstheline]

Here is a poem that I co-wrote last night with my friend Sophia





Once upon a minefield



Once upon a minefield
On a crayon siphoned interstate junction
There was a man whose mind was made of grated cheese
And this cheese was made from the milk of the mighty lactose cow
Which actually turned out to be
The sun
The sun is as lactose intolerant as most people on earth
We are all made of stars and scar-tissue then
Except for the leathery windex huffing cows
Just as windex cleans windows so too does a gel pen made from the snot of oysters
Clean the heavenly hooves
No ordinary oyster though
This oyster encompassed ravenous glue snorting sinews
Sinews that pumped the blood of processed fish
“No no no!
Mr. Flounder, there is too much combat on isle five
I think I’ll eat some strange pie now”
So the schizophrenic hydroponic dancing begins

And the stars went out as the grocery clerk chewed them down one by one
Starting at their lightswitch roots
And the man with the cheesed out brain
Crawled through the cowpies on kneepads into the whipcream dipped desert
And he placed all his malodorous revelations about him
In a circle like toy soldiers on green stands
So while the grocery clerk chomped and snarled down the heavens in a tornado of black hole cows
Whose neon signs pulsed like seismic cosmic nightclubs with no customers
The last child of cheese lay on a bed of scorpions among stops signs and machines which had broken down complaining of indigestion
Stomachs upset by commercial jingles
Nuclear radios still singing
And
Keeping the would be drivers fast asleep to dream of the creation myth of money
They missed the chance to make a wish at the shiny mess the oyster and grocery clerk puked back up
The form of heavy eyelid currency was so thick that it developed it’s own consumerist thought process
He watched the wrinkled old hermaphrodites paint their faces in feces on green paper
The copper mouths opened and said
“Hey buddy got a light? I wanna smoke my watch
Oh and What time is it?”
A stretchy rubber ducky smile
“Time enough for all of us to catch fire and then heal our burns
And miss burning
Miss burning was the name of a reluctant prostitute messianic figure skater
What a figure…”
This he remarked while thinking of where to graffiti a permanent marker fresco next
”I’m not afraid of the god-raisins, let them wet themselves back into grapes for all I care”
Here’s what the good book that you can only buy at the gas station has to say about it
So they spit forth a pillow plow made of planks and banks and mustard tanks which gave many stanks
And YES they changed it into wine and moonshine for the kiddies
That sent forward into backwards
And just yesterday it seemed like it was still headed by flaming cheeseballs
Pointing a mozzarella lightning finger over the hill at the coming metal elephant earthquake
A stretched accusatory pinky finger says in a voice like floral print sofas
“For want of a peanut, a forest was murdered
Here they come round the burning mulberry bush
Ghastly ghosties and little roasties!
My Christmas thoughts were ruined by the rolling of the cheese wheel sounding off
Triumphant over the find of lost hard candies under the couch”
And he grabbed a catapult and placed on it
Sliced and diced wedding rice balls that would ascend
Just to fall on the wall of the bellowing gelatinous foxes in man suits driving Lamborghini canons
Honking his nose and spewing a green gunpowder psychosis mucosa
It zips into the clouds fast enough to bend back in time
For the oyster to eat I whole
And the grocery clerk to eat the oyster
And all the while no one noticed that it was not THEIR future being eaten
But rather a different future
One with dust and gamma irradiated perfume
Where all the heros live in sandwiches being eaten by canaries in foalmines
Who upon seeing the teeth of each devourer might quiver and say
“I tawt I taw an apocawyptic puddy tat” before keeling over in a drug overdosed pile
Of feathers and carbon monoxide soda pop
And there was little to be said but this could be included as it is a side note that the future is only made
Of the skins of dead animals that testicle donating PETA members and gun toting monkey hunting nuns
Use to cover up their syringes of animal fat and sugar made of dead things rolling around and squirming
Like a tentacle of syphilis on an unmade bed
The automatic and uncharacteristically withdrawn monstrosity sent forth by conspiracy builders
Came not too long after the fatass prince of nostalgia bathed himself in secret diaper fantasies
Cheesebrain tells the baby dollar while cities stretch metal muscles to the faking point
“Here’s how it went down
I dialed 911 and the giggler on the other end of the line said
For Suicide assistance please press 1, for help disposing of bodies please press 2
If you are in need of drugs please press three
If you’re another jackass writer dialing 911 for shits and giggles we advise you to press 1 but what ever you do, don’t press 4”
Naturally I pressed 4 instantly and heard the shriek of cats fighting on the other line
I looked up and the planes were crashing because their canine pilots were bleeding out the ears
From the seductive dog whistle set off by my pushing in the bluebeard code
So I went back to the phone dialed 911 and pressed 1 with my tongue
Pressing the magic number activates
The gun
The gun is the silencer and the silencer is the disconnected operator scrambling for a scalpel”
*BEEEPP BEEP BEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE EEEEEEEEEEE*
It’s like she died from eating healthy oatmeal!
Good world what is this god coming to!?
Send forward some tomato paste and bathe that phone in the purifying sugars of brownness
As the brownness comes from the same sugarcane the priests like to use for administering beatings
The pope’s hat pumps fake feathers and fur coats!
Where is the hamster of the toilet clan!?
Where the hell are you? We need yesterday’s special tomorrow and you failed like a whale with the clap
I ding the order bell in the 666 diner and realize everything was already an overcooked on the outside
Pink clod cold in the middle afterlife and the chain chain chain of dead housewives
And newly sober tuba players will be waiting for me after every insubordination subliminal transformation
With meat cleavers and rabid pet beavers saying with morbid admiration
“Teach us to die again the way you did when we were young and willing to lie to the doctors
Just to get anti depressants that we flushed down the toilet
To keep them from polluting the minds of those who had caught the pure sadness
In flypaper butterfly nets, oh teach us, teach us!”
Then then would hand me the meatcleavers even though we all know
If there are no endings to anything then what’s the point in going forward?
No matter how many monkey wrench park bench typos you loving throw in like easter egg hand grenades
Ah look over yonder el Niño
Here come the nail filing defilers pulling file cabinets full of dental records in little red wagons
Cancan dancing in military formation
In a cloud of pixie dust and oysters and cowpies and handcrafted faberge ovaries
With turquoise curlers in their pubic hair and their bald heads gleaming like imposter moons
Here they come
Best take up a spoon
And start digging

[Jon]

”I’m not afraid of the god-raisins, let them wet themselves back into grapes for all I care”


I love how you take me to another world...my world as I see fit.

[flaggwalkstheline]

You...

I was standing there in the cold

On the sidewalk

The air was mean enough to make my left eye drip and then freeze the tear to my cheek

Me and three other guys were waiting to get on the bus whenever it decided to show up

We all kept walking back and forth from the signpost to the bench

Occasionally craning our necks to see if it was coming

And then I noticed that all the cars had turned their lights on

And were rushing past our chunk of concrete iceberg like sparkeyed sharks way out in the deep

And isn’t it odd that I think of the cars as turning themselves on?

The human element finally removed

People need machines to turn them on but the machines can get off just fine without flesh

A cancer cowering under the precise shining scalpel

I know exactly when it was exorcised for me

It was you

No not you

You

But if you want

You can pretend I mean you

Are you ready?

I would take a deep breath but I’m afraid it would ice over my lungs

What I can’t tell you

Is

I knew exactly well what would happen

I knew I didn’t have a chance at that point

Not then

We stood outside the café on the dull red cobblestone in our winter coats

At the very start of winter

But it seems like many seasons ago

You were about to walk away and I asked if you could just wait a moment

Then I stammered out words that felt sweet and sticky in my throat like honey on a spoon over a teacup

“I really like you”

And you smiled uncomfortably and said nothing

So I asked if it would be ok if I kissed you goodbye

And you shook your head and said,

“No I have a boyfriend, we’re friends”

I remember you had food stuck in your teeth, something brown on the front ones

I stared down at my boots

“Oh”
It wasn’t quite cold enough for me to see my breath on that day

“So, I won’t ever bother you about anything like this again”

And that should have been it

That should have been

The last words spoken on the subject

But I can’t seem to fit your eviction into my schedule

So months later

I stood in the cold waiting for the bus at 6 in the evening

Wrapped up in gloves and a scarf and walking back and forth to try and keep warm

And when it’s coldest that I remember you the most

And think of things to say to win your idealized affection

I want to give you a nickname that only I can call you

But I knew I didn’t have

A chance

And I think about how at some point I may have had a chance

And blown it

(4 times through the mirror now, are you still following?)

When we stood under an umbrella in the spring

And I felt that I ought to pull you close

It was the way you looked at me, I’d never been looked at like that before

But for some reason I didn’t

Go for it

I butchered my only chance

And the other girls I meet up with at school or talk to on the internet

They don’t give me that sense

Of ludicrous hopefulness

That I had when I was with you for a brief amount of time

I tried in my own feeble way

And now whenever I talk to you

Your words whistle through my chest cavity like wind through gapped teeth

So I stood with three other people out in the cold all of us no doubt

Alone

Waiting for that big turquoise bus to take us all home

A guy with a cane hobbled up and looked behind him and saw it looming behind him

“Hot damn!” he said, “I never had timing good like this before.”

And what I’m shocked at is that he said

Hot Damn

I never heard someone actually say that before

Out side of old books

And the sad part is

Within year or so

I’ll find somebody new

To mope about while I ride the bus

And I’ll think to myself

“Hot damn, nobody’s ever written a poem quite like this one before!”

So yeah

You too will be forgotten

Just as I am forgotten

And then this will be written

For another you

[Jon]

First. I consider it an honor that an accomplished writer would allow me to read his work free of charge.

As to this poem; I LOVE " But I can’t seem to fit your eviction into my schedule"


One possible flaw:

" People need machines to turn them on but the machines can get off just find without flesh"

I suspect you meant "fine" rather than "find."

[flaggwalkstheline]

yep fixed the typo
thanx
hey I'm glad 2 share my poetry w/ anybody who's willing to listen, poetry and listening are both nearly lost arts

[flaggwalkstheline]

My intelligence is leaking out like my brain was incontinent with swiss cheese revelations

Shit man…
So there I was the biggest scorpion in the shark pit

The flashlight in my hand running out of lightbulb juice

Everybody in the whole town was watching with those little opera binoculars from their front porches by this time

I didn’t mind though, felt as natural as a bear eating a Pomeranian

Aunty-disaster she put on her freudian nightgown and ran out into the cigar smoke sunshine
Chasing that cheating mule of hers barefoot in the hardpan holding a frying pan

You shoulda seen it!

A tumbleweed tried to grab her ass so she dropped ashes from her roach clip on it and it skittered away

When you get far enough out in the wasted places

But not all the way to the next truncated reststop

It’s like whoever holds the crayon decided to just stop coloring the fields and skies

A psoriasis afflicted old billboard reads

“settin em up and knockin em down: A time honored American tradition since 1863, try it out: gun store at the next exit”

Aint that just the funniest gag ever?

Like one of them newspaper panels with marmaduke humping dagwood

Aw man I’d trade everything but my ego if I could just leave a mile wide trail of destruction through the hundred acre woods

All the stuffing’s gone outta my childhood friends and it’s stuck on the branches and on my hands

My hands, my hands
They don’t turn pages the way they used to but they still remember how to hold spoons

The storybooks I read when I was a kid all ended up on the burning pile eventually

The burning pile- the burning hemorrhoid

My ultimate procrastinated destination

Way out to the east of California those barbarians still put smiley faces and gold star stickers on their mother’s coffins

Can you believe that claudius?

I tell ya, kids today have no respect for honest butchery!

I’m shaking in my spurs at the thought of inheriting my old grandpa’s world

The old lawnmower showed me just where to push to make the dirt fly everywhere

Gimme another shot and I’ll tell you all about how I burned down a movie theater playing twilight

With the kids still inside of course, no half assed heroics for me no sir!

Ah, here comes the cavalry in assless chaps and sparkling cowboy hats best tip em well or they’ll never leave

Suddenly I smell perfume and I don’t know to whom It belongs to…

But it has an electric déjà vu to it

Just like when I bit my lip and spat it into the toilet

Floating there like a crimson jellyfish

I knew my mouth had bled here before

I’m finally burying my type-writer and licking my hatchet lips at the thought of blistering outta this femoral town next summer

The eastern edge of the Arizona desert has rocks that look like citric tombstones

I wonder what mummified martyrs are sleeping under them?

And for that matter WHO theyre sleeping with?!

Abe Lincoln has a milk mustache and is using the hole in his head as reverb for his banjo

Robert Oppenheimer shoulda been a folk singer

And don’t ya know Richard Nixon was a punk rocker?

I come from Alabama with a revolver on my knee

Cmon in the bottled water’s fine

So long as you can handle your sulfuric acid and the way you drink it shouldn’t be a problem

I shouldn’t say anything like that to your face, I’m sorry

Be a pal and turn around so I can say it behind your back

Everything gets pissed out sooner or later so sit down and drink up

I heard the kinda razor lollypop filth he said and to tell the truth I kinda liked it

Give me your tired huddled masses on a bed of flapjacks and bacon

I am one HUNGRY primate

Climate change is jingling in my sweaty pocket

And the hogs of war are howling for steak at the strip club

If I were an astronaut I’d take a permanent marker to the moon and write “for a good time call me at 1913-666”

Aw those aren’t the real numbers anyhow

What you thought I was gonna give you my home phone number huh?

I cant take any calls I’m too busy dialing strangers and breathing heavily into the phone

Pornography doesn’t do it for me anymore

(He says with tears of honest nostalgia in his bruised mango eyes)

Nope I get off on the guilt of knowing I bought pornography ha ha ha ha ha

As soon as the laughter stops

That’s when it starts to kick my ass and I just can’t handle the noise anymore

It’s the guilt

THE GUILT, Gilbert

It is chewing me apart like piranhas on the hunt for peanut butter and jellyfish sandwiches

And I don’t even remember what it is that I did to deserve feeling like this

I like it so much but I feel bad ‘cause I think I don’t even deserve my own self proclaimed martyrdom

And it aint just me all the dignity has spilled outta our tiny world like ink from a broken pen

26 kidneys just went on the black market

You can see em standing on the corner of Washington street and central avenue

Smeared with lipstick wearing garter belts around their interlobar renal arteries

Disgusting!

I never felt so sick in my life as when I saw all those cancer patients getting on top o’ that poor old woman

I used to play the saxophone when I was a boy but I melted it down for chrome noisy liquid

My dreams are shit and spitshined with cheap wine no matter how brightly I paint them

And not the kinda shit you can leave on someone’s doorstep

For um-


Shits and giggles

Fits and squiggles

Cmon you bastard of a swamp monster engine

Turn your slummy cranium west and start coughing for me

The words fail to come no matter how much I try to stimulate them

I’m changing the subject so my implied stupidity doesn’t get called in for interrogation

Hey did ya see the tits on that chicken, mm hmm makes me wanna just chop em off and make nuggets

Have you bought all you’re Christmas presents yet?

I know it’s July but hey it’s always good to get a leg up on the competition

Better yet
Amputate the morons before they can sharpen their righteous high noon saws first

Oh boy the new thing is to hang tiny fetuses from your tree howbout that?

What’ll they think of next?!

I think it’s only a matter of time before the carolers take come all ye faithful as a cue to have a big candycane orgy

Gimme another napalm facepalm martini and I’ll tell ya all about it

[Jon]

" A psoriasis afflicted old billboard..."


Man, I just love your style!

no half assed heroics for you, no sir!

[flaggwalkstheline]

mwa ha ha ha
I gave the most psychotic performance of that last night
yarg i wish i had video taped it

[Jon]

I do too!


I'll bet it was scary and funny.



Locke (my son) really enjoyed the movie theater line!

[flaggwalkstheline]

Fear
Once every generation

That’s what the old one’s who still remember speak of while looking upwards

Once every generation…
My bodhi tree withers without water and my legs are cramping something awful

I don’t think I have enough fear inside me to ever spoonfeed anyone a radioactive sermon
on the mount
It blooms within me, a vein blue flower

Like the white light circle on an old television turning off and closing in on itself

A dawn

Of thin, nourishing FEAR

Dripping from a spoon

Spit it all out

A handful of dust

Perhaps?

A vein-blue flower

Perhaps

There is a reptile in my head with one claw on the thermometer

Turning, turning

The other unwashed hand on the radio

A hundred familiar choruses all singing back and forth

Two eyes search two eyes search two eyes

I’ve heard this story before and so have you

It’s there inside you sunning on a rock

So have you and you and you

Your spots give you away and the other hunters know you are not of their brood

Turning

Have I started forgetting to count the days and ways?

Or the hours?

Or the tragedies?

The people and their dictionaries and censuses?

Or is it possible

They have forgotten to count me?

I watch them prance, skip, run

And eventually

Settle down triumphantly silenced at last

In cars, in bunkers, in stupors

Or on benches

Waiting for metal saviors after having forgotten how to use their legs

Two eyes search two eyes

Search

In this space of concrete and clouds

They compete to be the greyest and the coldest

Never quite the boldest

I stretch out catlike and suck my displaced lungs

Back inside

Waiting outside the door staring intently as the wood and metal

Bend to the shape of the crosslegged thinker

A voice outside says, “I believe in wars of resistance.”

Two eyes two eyes
Peripheral paradigm shift of nightlight consciousness

A fever, afraid

The true broken jaguar which needs no hollow words to describe it

Is only visible in a reflection of a reflection of a reflection of an echo

Two eyes search two eyes search two eyes

And find only the jutting hard edges of things arrogant and buried

You can meditate all night but you’ll never get it

Without my help you are rushing down a one way street with no destination and a failing machine

An empty potato chip bag on one of my feet is kicked off and just lies there

Emptied and salted

A fever

Afraid

These hills are losing their rolling awareness of who is lying on them pulsing with lowtide mumbles

For a tinfoil AHA! moment

You floated towards me in the arterial deep

A fever, afraid

All gleaming titan-orbit eyes and coral reef hair

I could not hear any sighs of relief or release from my drowned ears

But I could smell the saltwater crocodile tears on your breath

Frozen on my shoulder

Two eyes search two eyes search two eyes

The tunnels are not collapsing but we stomp claustrophobically through them as if they were

Falling ethereal pieces of tetanus treasure

The body to the soil

The tapestry to strings

A fever

An eye

Afraid

The earth and moon and dream

Into a scream

A Jaguar

The puzzle

To the wind

We are but birds on a temporary updraft over a toothless mineshaft

Cages waiting somewhere down below with discarded placebo gasmasks

The sacrifice will go as planned and the trumpets will weep

In nickel-plated terror

Someone is coming, I can hear his iron footsteps

An iceberg snapped like a brittle
thighbone off from somewhere far south

And it is traveling north churning the swimming pool like butter

With a marrowstrength promise to infect the warm places

The mosquitoes flee in bloodsucking panic

Potato chips crackle under my malaria teeth

A fever, afraid

A fever a fever afraid

There is a man on his way to see us and he’s not the one any of you expect

Two eyes search two eyes search two eyes

Spin three times and say your words of power in front of the mirror

When you stand on the edge

Your cities wheezing themselves apart

Cortez is coming from across the gulf

And his armor shines brighter than any of our sungods

Is anyone watching?

Or am I just greedily turning in abstract darkness while the clichés feed

Upon my flesh

Upon my flesh

A fever

The emperor takes off his clothes and realizes they make him what he is

Afraid

To the fever is fed the vision and to the vision is fed the body

Small fish

A fever

Big teeth

Afraid

Big fish

Swims through eyesockets

Small teeth

A reflection, an echo

Jaguar, jaguar what happened to your claws?

Blunted into well manicured baubles, they built great things once

Spit it all out

You still have your teeth and your now un-climbable pyramids

A fever

Cortez comes across the ocean once every generation

Afraid

They all climb under the blankets with me and take notes on my breathing and my drooling

Spit it all out

A sweaty raindrop shakes it’s liquid hips landing kerspam on a mardi-gras parade

The wall of ice looms and weaves it’s white carpet while I lick an icecream cone happily under an industrial shadow

Slowly and methodically packing away his clothes and a good shined pair of barely worn black shoes in an old suitcase

For the last time

A dam full of cracks and covered in spraypainted apocrypha prepares once more

To let go

[flaggwalkstheline]

I think this is gonna be

One of those days

One of these days

Have you ever had one?

Mornings where you lie under cold blankets counting nosebleeds

And the amount of times the ceiling fan spins

Cosmic spiderwebs refuse to get off the merry-go-round

Moments where electricity arcs through the bodies of silenced children and they don’t even know it

Unlike us

Grown and unwounded

Bound with electrical tape on the highest hills

Hiss the whitest pills

Trim your possum fur coat frills

Moments where you pretend to relive your first love, sloppy and quick in the backseat

Fresh meat

You don’t remember

You wish you had that ember

Noons with no purpose but to stare at red sunlight

Glinting off of empty wineglasses on tables where no one is eating

Relish the untainted hotdog for it is your last

Eating the days

Where chimney smoke glurps from empty houses with the ashes of burned lovers

Hours when you had

The nubile voice of anubis

The flesh of the virus

Medium rare in a stove

Butcher it’s glass vials (seven, there are seven)

Divide it among the hungry

Feed the bearded doomsayers licorice

Feed me candy in the shining motel lobby

These are days

Where waking feels like sleeping

Dreams creeping across the sand

A dead cowboy holds a lantern and points the way

Every night the folksingers pray for new catastrophe to bump and grind their minds against

The red guitar coughs in my music-less arms

Nights when floating lighthouses crash blind into sand vacuumed shores

And engines dock in a void

Days of fire and grapes and orange soda soliloquies

Red buddah, dead bubba show me a new path

Stomping through old trees with as many rings as Jupiter

Hours of cloud socket realizations

You have polluted the waters of my all-soul

And I have done the same to you

We have only this one day

One day forever

To remember

[flaggwalkstheline]

Because we are real
When I squeeze your hand in mine

And you squeeze back wordlessly

It’s like an affirmation

Of every everything pure, primal and good

Your touch is that of burning green afternoons spent lying on shady stones

And the taste of small and imperfect yet perfectly real apples

Plucked wormless from a bent tree in a gold field off the side of the interstate

So let the dreamless say what they will as they struggle to stay afloat in an ocean they deny

At the very least

We are real

So let us weave our fingers into a tapestry

While other people pave over their flowerbeds

Choking on the promise of endless sleep

At the very least

We are awakened

The liquids of our opened eyes flow in a river of brown and blue

And at night when sirens and jet engines rise like heatwaves off of former forests

And middleclass dogs pace freshly trimmed backyards howling for meat

I hold your memory like a supernova close to my breast

We kissed three times in the back seat

With each one a live wire frazzed on our lips

So let the machinery of heartbreak and the cities of faked want cough blood and soot toward their unreachable heavens

Our love is a geranium sprouting from junkyard dust

[flaggwalkstheline]

Holden Caulfield is dead/ The last moments of my youth/ 1/28/10
Holden Caulfied’s alter ego died today

Ninety one years old

Eaten alive by unending teenage rebellion

When I left highschool

It felt oddly similar to the way Holden did it

I’d failed junior year twice

Wouldn’t do it anymore

Couldn’t

So the last day of school

Which, as usual, was a big party

Felt like a garish funeral to me

I would have lit out much earlier

Except for Sara

She was the first person I ever really loved

She was slightly younger than me

16 to my 17

Black hair, brown eyes, 5 feet tall

We spent a lot of lunchtimes

In eachother’s arms behind the dumpsters

Listening to punk rock on an old cassette player

Writing on eachother’s arms with bic pens

Occasionally swapping brief electric kisses

So

I stayed an extra 8 months

And on the last day

We sat on a bench saying nothing under a big oak tree

While other students and teachers lined up for burgers from a grill

We both knew

I was preparing to sever the gangrenous umbilical cord connecting me to childhood

And she still had a bit more to go

I asked her if she would stay happy, stay lovely

The bell rang and all the kids flew away on skateboards like birds heading south

I kissed her mouth one last time and walked off into the sunshine

Thinking of Holden hollering “So long assholes!” at his sleeping prep school

Alright

Not all of that is true

We weren’t in love

I mean

I was

She wasn’t

I never kissed her

Not once

We embraced a few times

But like Chekov’s soldier

I’m a crumby liar

A phony

I wanted to kiss her on that last day

But something kept me from doing so

I took the bus back to my mother’s house

And sobbed like the faker I am

That other way I told it is just the way I wish everything would have happened

My tragedies do not shine

They merely thud

And spill salt on lumpy white scars

And now Holden is dead

He would have understood

Why I keep writing about the ocean even though I’ve never seen it

So here I am

Hopefully you think of me

The next time

You stick your fist out the sunroof of the car your parents bought you and yell “Teenage wasteland forever!”

Rotchyer teeth out Amadeus!

I’m an unemployed community college student who fancies himself a poet

Holden in his straightjacket

Would have called me a faker

For going off into the big world like all the other cowards in love

And I have tried to make the leap tried with all my feeble powers of persuasion

I have only dropped and had enough time to hold up a sign like wiley coyote that says

Oh No!

Oh no indeed

I suppose I’ll grow out of these juvenile melodramatics someday

But in the meantime I’ll just shake my fist and swear at the successful and the sleeping

[Jon]

"Why I keep writing about the ocean even though I’ve never seen it"


Good line.

I wish to declare this the best of your work that I have read. I red VERY few poems once. I have read a handful of poems more than 5 times. This work falls into that handful.

Thank you!

[flaggwalkstheline]

heh nonfiction poems always pack a little extra wallop don't they?

[Jon]

Aye, they do!

[flaggwalkstheline]

Cannibalized Poem #15

The thirsty sea captain of whirligig beatles whips his knightly motherboard into a nein legged frenzy

Stencil a picture of a green eyed ape over the declarations underneath a sooty pidgeon-shit bridge

Fermented stigmata armada on the march

Or was it in june?

The time gets away from daydreaming fictitious lusts at nine in the morning gets boring

Either way

Their footsteps shake my eyebrows and rotted fruit thumps from bone fingered trees

Was it you Jennifer Of Arc?

Grinding thighbones together in search of a spark

Believe when I say I’m no lieutenant, no nomad, no whore, no hound dog

If I ever crash it will be silent and undramatic

No discovery of fire to be made by THIS neanderthal

My ship is sinking before I even push it out into the bay so don’t tell me we’re all sailors eventually

The taxidermied sharks swim about me spreading sleep and gum disease

Full on lightning bolt taste of battery acid lipstick in my mouth

A wave-goodbye crashing session illuminated by a stradivarius bonfire

The random violins yowl and throw themselves into a pile

My lesson I’m pressing like olive oil

On a chalkboard with a rusty sword

A tin can being kicked down the sidewalk

Because I can’t find a rock big enough to brain this thing with

Tell the band to hit it and tell the boys back home I still remember their games and their veins

I don’t blame them for the mess in my stygian bedroom

No rivers run eternally

Out of breath on the outskirts of a woozy metropolis

Climb the panty-strewn burial mound, milkshake in hand and try to dig an apology from the crabgrass

I don’t blame you for the fall of Rome even if you blame me for dragging down Babylon by the bootstraps

It’s all carbonated history now

Murky water swishing like mouthwash under a bridge

So why don’t you fill a suitcase with fool’s gold and come on home?

Ten thousand volts and 50 CC’s but not a bit more brainpower beyond what you got from a magazine in a doctors office

I know what this sickness is; it dribbles from my faceholes nonstop

The opera singers don’t like my baritone heckling

“Such a fickle child” she shakes her head sadly and tsks

In a few pine-scented hours when the sun is rising over the newly polished guillotines

They’ll lock him up for enjoying the communion amphetamine a bit too much

That 2nd place golden boy’s blood greases the police car’s motors

“Alright machine gun Hubert, we got you surrounded, you cmon out now

We’ll make a martyr outta you yet!”

The promise of chocolate calls out a slobbering horde of banktellers

Who have never left home but have walls covered in maps fingerprinted brown

No one wanted to hide under the stairs with me and now they’re all sick with reality

“Shhh stay quiet or they’ll hear us

Pull up the covers and lock the door

We’ll drain the fluid from the evening’s wounds”

It used to be easy to disappear in a puff of nicotine

Zip bam kadabra I was gone but not so much anymore

The words that used to be magick are mediocre catchphrases at best

Now I take a step and hit the floor without being ready at all

Where’s my horned viking virgin dunce cap?

I’m going off into the ice and it would be nice to keep my face on fire

My decapitated valentine slides her head on my shoulder and says “te amo”

I’m having an optical coptic migraine

Pass the champagne, charlemagne

This is the last time

(Shout it like it chokes you)

THE LAST TIME

I let you try and burn me at the stake

Turn me over I’m cooked on this side

Your sulfur solution halitosis is getting strong

I’m not strong enough to lift the boot off my polished back

Like a boulder in the way of a golf course

I just sit here with a hoarse throat scheming my way into obscurity

Take my purity; go on, it’s not doing me any good

Bury it deep

See if it grows into dogwood

The last time I chipped my teeth on a stone

Carved the message on my bones

I set off into the muddy hills with burned lungs and a knapsack full of clove cigarettes

Guilty pleasures manacled to my beer-battered kneecaps

Pulling like overeager dogs on leashes

Towards the greenest hills and greatest hits my blinded sockets have neither seen nor heard

[Jon]

"I don’t blame them for the mess in my Stygian bedroom"




May I suggest you use a different interior decorator next time. One sans " Hell" or "Styx" in the name.






"Pass the champagne, charlemagne"


Perhaps you want a cap "c" on that name.


"My decapitated valentine slides her head on my shoulder and says “te amo”




YES!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Love it!

[flaggwalkstheline]

Vamanos

A gun fires into the air at the starting line

But nobody moves an inch

The horses, the jockeys, the junkeys, the trenchcoat wearing icecream dealers, the scorched pianos

The squealers and the healers look on in sarcastic admiration

They hear the boom but they look at the empty stands and realize that only one gladiator gets to leave

But if the emperor’s thumbs get cut off who wins then?

Who wins when everybody wants to be hungry tommorow?

Alli es no mañana para los ganadors

The winners

They go, they move, they yarl down the tunnels because they know there is no tomorrow

Their assistants wait for the signal and start scribbling furiously

Los rios corre loco cerca aqui

Padre-time’s malodorous legendary engine revs up

The rivers run crazy around here

Is someone out there? I hear movement in the dream

A glass shoelace chainsaw howling invisible

Hasta los arboles de combatir son asustado

I can’t hear anything but tapdancing now that I’ve inhaled too much self-help immolation

Even the trees of war are afraid now

Spinning saliva bounces from an old man’s rainjacket

Mythological fact twisting my arm burning the farm

Looming over the electric shadow of a broken down hearse on some imaginary interstate

It’s my head that gets in the way of seeing infinity

Through these two mirrors I meant no harm

Step out the front door late enough and you’ll see there’s always a red light in the east

Entre los dos reflejars, yo previsto no daño

A gaudy carnival that the stomping fluorescent elephant wants to get off

Last time you were here among the petroleum sparrows

You held your sweetheart’s pillowy hand at the top of the ferris wheel

And felt their vertigo heartbeat that said

This is it, the highpoint, it’s all crashing from here on out kiddo

If that wave of seizure inducing trueness

Were to bring us darkly to our skinned knees again

The mechanic’s clownly laughter might thump to a sludgy crawl

But there is a towering glowering flowering bonfire

Between us now

The high horses huff the smoke of carriages, corsets and caskets

Heaped dull orange a mile tall

The wall sprouts from a seed of panic

Past where the groves taper off into swampland

Tittering flute players hop on broken toenails and warm their elbows

There is a solution outside of the book

Outside of the choice between the green and the concrete

Be a locomotive like me after all

Crash me off the iron centipede tracks with a shout that tastes like grapes

Your voice steams like february daylight

Bienvenido al mundo tan gigantesco y feo

Blooming across the cardboard desert, primitive and mean

Welcome to the big and ugly world

Cockroaches come out in the rainy season to fill their bongs and lungs

Moving across the sand and prosthetic legs, abandoned

They know what to do when you spill saltwater on them

And the old fellow sleeps easy and grunts careful not to roll over on his bedsores

Bearded and drooly, forgetful clouds

The opposite of our scrubbed-nerveless faces

We’ll sneak past his brobdingnagian hightops

With a plan to hammerbomb his bedroom’s-worth of grandfather clocks

Feeling blind for a door in a crippled kitchen

I run my glimmering hand along the bottom of the barrel and feel the splintery sweetness of old popsicle sticks

It’s a nation of inertia and insomnia so movement even inside a shriek is wanted

Something moves in the murk and we honestly don’t see it, don’t feel it, don’t smell it, till we are it

We used to be honest and we used to be true

With hands more real than soil holding illuminati-free pitchforks

But the edges we pitched our tents on moved away
And pitched us onto flatland rather than over them into the pit we were flirting with

Flatland with nothing but wind and cigarettes to chase after under the arms of windmills and watches

Ticking and ready to blow this whole place is gonna go, push a wooden carousel to the atmosphere

There’s a red light in the east and the referee waves his prison flag and yells go go go

Go, the tattooed hands on my sweatless back coax

Go, the disembodied genitals bubbling beneath the suburbs urge

A fine set of two letters carved out of pure desire, these are our gifts to you

Go, the Stonehenge rocketship builders adam bomb ghost grins

And as I look down into the trees and see where the sunshine stops

I just want some form of movement even if it’s only the type that happens without a seatbelt

When you return home more redfaced than when you left, what then?

you imitation leather Nazarene

What then? Once the power none of us question goes out and you’re left with matches?

If something moves and it’s not quite clear what, I might hesitate briefly

But like a sheep in a blender, I’ll reach for it

I’ll reach for it like a doughnut-baited beartrap

I’ll hold up a bandaged stump and lick the sugar of my in-shock lips

And if anyone asks I’ll say through a mouth full of sweet

I regret nothing except that I regret nothing

A person eating a doughnut never regrets

[Jon]

I am honored time and again to read your works.

"I run my glimmering hand along the bottom of the barrel and feel the splintery sweetness of old popsicle sticks"


I thought such phrases existed only in my head. uttered from self, to self in a moment of solitude. It's like I am there!

[flaggwalkstheline]

What I have

I have a thunderstorm whose batteries just gave their last buzz
And I have a pair of navy-blue underwear with a hole on in the front
Like so many other magicks gathering dust on a shelf
They have stopped doing their menial tasks but I hold onto them
Anyway
The keepsakes pile up under my bed and eventually evict the boogeymen
I have the shame over a thousand dreadful deeds I haven’t committed yet
I have a pornographic film projecting in my head nonstop like a sweaty carnival
I have cardboard pieces to a puzzle I’ll never put together

So tell me
Is it time to throw the whole invasive operation away?
The metal arms on this clock have almost stopped clicking
I have a pocket full of earthquakes dropping off into places as foreign as atlantis or shangri-la

I have a shriek that hasn’t started yet
But when it does
Like an unfueled steam engine fable unfolded
It will smash the wallpaper with nonexistent fists and knock paper airplanes out of the sky

I have a field watered green by a thousand years of nonstop genocide
I have a plant whose petals I unfolded to find nothing special inside
Nothing special
These words echo off the walls of my movie theater like thrice lobotomized symphonies

I’ve got a deep breath that I have put off taking until I see ripened banana blotches in my vision


I've got a shiny new heartbreak that can go from 666 to zero in 10 seconds flattened
And I'll parade around grinning psychopathic and toughguyish
Like a child with two black eyes stomping through the rusty playground
Other unblemished worshippers of the true gash
Ooo and aw from their muddy hovels
And imagine throwing their bulky flesh
Like tinfoil candy wrappers into the dumpster with wasps and flies and drippy milk cartons
And you and me and me and you will go hand in hand on the scenic route
We will go
Leaping red hot medium-rare and furious
Into the volcano of my hollowed out melodramatic sickness

[flaggwalkstheline]

So I think I’ve finally gone and done it now

I watched from the curb bouncing a baseball in my left hand

As the big men with their mermaid tattoos pack up all the uneaten birthday cakes in black trashbags

And take them away where no one could eat them

I wonder if there’s a tropical island somewhere being ruined because all the uneaten birthday cakes

With their melted wax and smudged happys are dumped unceremoniously SPLATT from planes into palm trees


The Jumper cables clank to the ground

“I’ve finally done it now!”

He says smiling and putting down the red paintbrush while the monster struggles on a reflective table vainly


This is the last moment where I can just sit here helplessly crosslegged

Meditation in search of some hidden cosmic vibration

While the paperwork for my bent smiles’ parking permit is filled out by someone else

Even rolling around in my own filth has lost it’s taboo luster by now

The ink stains all the hands but my own cleaned fingers

My lack of experiential filth and my lack of real meat reality to chew on

I scratch them onto wooden tables at bars where people full of true destruction try to drown

Afraid that anyone of them my single me out for lacking the real fury



At night I hear the humpback whales blowing their ram horns

But I wake up in the dirt still sleeping in a pile with the coyotes

These things are what I talk about manically nonstop shackled to my gnawed funnybone

The words sprout from my mouth like weeds in the cracks on a green stone tennis court

The questions jut out of my arms like cactus spine syringes

With only half of the sharp thing visible it’s just a quest


“Question:

If money and sex are the powers keeping most men strong

Then why do I feel like I could chop down a mountain with my words alone

when I have had so little of either lately?

Answer:

Because those are the big drugs

The granddaddy opiates

And if one has not opened the door for them more than a little crack then

They could not possibly be rampaging in the bloodstream now could they?”

He adjust his bowtie and sits back down behind his briefcase

“No further questions your honor, the suspect clearly has delusions of mediocrity”


So in my ignorance of all important truths I am of an iron mind

Steel apologizing for no reason to the chicken neck being lopped off

I’m sorry if my tetanus bootspurs ever cut you

I never wanted anyone to bleed their secrets onto my tastebuds

I hold onto this masochistic eucharistic sadness

If only to keep the awful silence out of my eyelashes

Off of my drugless but somehow junkielike hollow chest

I tap graffiti strewn bathroom stall walls with my chewed to the cuticle fingertips

Listening to the pages in a book flipping like doves wings but making no cooing noises


“I always felt sorry for the pigeons when I gave them bread

And they didn’t even know the difference between wonderbread and good jewish rye

But I gotta keep the moments from the inbetween from getting to me like fresh squeezed antifreeze”

He closes his trenchcoat and strides off taking big busy steps leaving shitty bootmarks on the jury’s faces


I could have gone for it today, you know

I saw the headlights and the fog, the light in the refrigerator

I saw a fire extinguisher in a locked cabinet

Saw the way the sidewalk curved away off into some fake oblivion

Saw the way the nettles try to creep up between the slabs

I could have done it today

I could have gone for it

When I met that street performer with the guitar

And sang with him in front of a condemned deli

About hollis brown who lived on the outskirts of town

While he (aaron his name was aaron) played 2 haunted chords over and over on the strings

I could have followed that path until it went off into the sand

And slept on the rocks and the cacti

Lived momentarily in the wind like a dried leaf skittering insectile dysfunction


“Infected the whole time”, the morticians speak softly and hold their black derby hats to their shaved chests


Solemnly I swear I didn’t build the atomic typewriter

It just landed groaning and hot on my front lawn one day and I didn’t even listen to it when it told me to touch it

I didn’t listen even when the doctors plotted against me outside the door while my mother nodded in approval

I didn’t listen when they screamed STOP like it was a cork to be thrown down my gullet

And all the ketchup bottles were shattered on the bathroom floor

I could have gone for it, you know

I could have gotten moving today

Packed up my can openers and letter openers and bottle openers and left the refrigerator lonley

I could have sped off into the dusk as if it was waiting for me

Died in the silence and woken up somewhere noisier than here

But no

The tourists fuck eachother sensible on beds of nails and the shreds of the last groups who were here last night

Changed by maids nightly used to lowering themselves on winches and wenches over the shark tank


“The clouds are quiet today, I wish you would say something

Have you noticed the way the clouds don’t worry about touching each other?

When I float off I want to stay floating and never rain back down on my old parade”


He says, she says in a ping pong game between paraplegics in glued to the floor wheelchairs

“Not today, not tonight, not ever Copernicus, I’m tired and have a headache so go discover the heavens yourself”

She rolls over and goes to sleep and the dog creeps up to her very late

And staringly he imagines eating her face instead of being a good boy

Not tonight not tonight not tonight the record skips waiting for bobby jean to surrender

Tonight the paper or plastic monster stays asleep is still chained to his addictions

Tonight is for eating rotten apples and wiping the sweat from my piggy forehead like condensation on a beer glass

But when summer comes

(Take a deep breath and try to feel the first sparks of spring on your cheeks)

I’ll follow that path into wordlessness and a green lie

When summer finally comes

[Jon]

“No further questions your honor, the suspect clearly has delusions of mediocrity”


Love it!