Excretory Rex

First,
I am not a smart man, a healthy man
or a reasonably sane man.
I haven’t wealth, power or privilege.
In spades,
what I have earned is ignorance
sickness and instability –
poverty, lies and exclusion,
and I’d say that’s all you need to know,
but I started this on the word “first,”
which means you deserve a second –
being a fair man… here’s your number two!!
(please note: as originally performed
you would now be getting shit
hurled at you from the speaker’s podium.
This is in decidedly poor taste,
but engendering poor taste, well,
that’s just how poverty works…
so eat it.)

No Drink. No Life.

I have tired of hangovers.
I have not tired of drinking.
My lungs cannot tolerate all this smoking.
I only smoke when I drink.
I have not lost tolerance for all this drinking.
My guts are a simmering pot of glue.
My eyes catch phantoms lurking in the peripheries.
Nonexistent menace crawls the skirting boards.
Fingers tremble.
Esophagus wretches.
I ate French toast and can’t remember.
Illness cradles my face like a psychopaths loving hands
in the tender moments
before she snaps your neck.
Alacrity anchors far from the shore
where naked blasphemers crab walk into breaking waves
leaving sand as barren as the inside of a scoured skull
that has heard bloated pancreas tales
witnessed failed kidney picture plays
and told the dead liver romances
in the days of ears and eyes and lips and tongues
and although those are gone days
I have not tired of drinking.

Shakes

She ran by
I caught her from both sides
an inelegant piston-pounding stride
coming: titties hopping
going: the ass had a different dance
shifting, one moon up
one down
slipping against one another
like a California fault line
I guess that makes
her asshole
the epicenter
her body mother earth
and I’m battling for balance
against the shock waves
made by one female
jogger
too cheap
too indelicate
too clever
to fall prey
to the devices
of sports bra manufacturers

Behind

On her hand she wears
a white plastic bag
adorned in red Target store bull’s eye logos,
walking two blond dogs
she bends at the waist
in her black spandex slacks
stooping to pick up shit
as a hawk circles on the hunt overhead
in the bright dawn
light strikes her ass
rendering the fabric transparent
down to skin and the thin blue thong
a strip that serves only to accentuate
the stark divide between precious spheres
her prizes gathered, she stands
and all returns to obscurity
even the raptor has disappeared
behind the mountain
or fallen upon prey in the tall grass
leaving me to ponder
if my choice in bird watching was the right one

Ass

Compassion is not everything
generosity is not everything
what matters most
what has the most to do with everything
is who we choose to be
generous and compassionate toward
it is in our choices
where
we truly show our ass to the world
and once exposed
it will be for the world to pick
whether to kiss or whether to kick

Why We Watch Movies

We are not allowed to look at human faces and we watch movies instead
pigeons preening on light-posts snap a smoke-feather free
against harsh blue bright sky it drifts white
lost in light to the silent white jet plowing
into a petite tight white cling wrap clung Japanese ass
that turns the corner at 50 and York
how the eye wanders over all these bodies canned in clothes
when your wife works all the day and baby escape comes only at night
to the bar where you’d rather be less than any other time
soaking up skirts like lamp shades illuminated through
where you can see crabs a leaping pube to pube
without complaint for want of blood, wanting tenderly
down ingrown-forest-of-hair thighs
that harbor the finer meaning of trench warfare stains
crimson and shit-streaked remains on pantie-body-bags
cladding cunt, cross, Christ and crematorium class
all in time for the curtains big reveal: your only friends
projected for your perusal, for your approval, for your sick objectifying
disdain – faces ogled like asses, eyeless and nonjudgmental
like the wink concluding the peep show on the other side of the two-way mirror

Senryu #1

You can be human
your whole life and never learn
not to pick at it

Rotten to the Core

How are these casually dim thoughts,
I think of as mine, even marginally
distinct from others?
Is there no one else,
in all the 7 billion and counting,
who could be me,
who could wind up being me
one or two thousand years after my death?
If no two sets of fingerprints are alike,
then can no two minds be alike in their imprint?
How close would the reproduction have to come
to fool the modest observer…
remove the house finch mother from its nest
replace it with another
will the ornithologist spot the impostor
can a bird be a forgery? a man?

In the forge of the womb
what alchemical trick of cellular division
makes you, you
and them, them
and not one for the other
like an unknown changeling growing up happy
and all the family commenting on her familial traits:
great-grandma’s eyes, daddy’s smile,
aunt Anna’s ears, mommy’s laugh,
grandpa’s mechanical aptitude
grandma’s quick temper
from face to mind
we might see what we want
the dead might live again
the pro-choice vegan reborn as pro-life oviraptor
don’t try to make sense of it
the paints are mixed, pigments perfect
lead added for the right period feel
the strokes accurate
shading precise, but this is an artful resurrection
several centuries out of date
like the apple tree graft, notched in
that bears the genetically undifferentiated fruit
of the original rooted tree,
but without the roots it is free to spread
primitive clone, continent to continent
mouth to mouth – identical
at least by how we reckon,
but the world is not the same
Granny Smith unchanging in her ways
unable to be born again
victim of her own sexless identity,
her inalterability, and that’s it
the answer
like it or not, each human is unique
in our wild heterozygosity
no one individual ever comes back
or should
not in one thousand years
not in two thousand years
from face to mind
we might see what we want
but the dead never live again

Life in Syndication

Failure to reject repetition
dooms us to history,
to the breathless admiration
of backwards barbarians,
among them our forebears,
and savages

In our understanding of the past
must come condemnation
for its nonchalant letting of blood,
oceans of it,
menstrual moon-tides of manly gore –
depraved carrion lapping tongues,
emerging from violent red surf,
wrestle crimson slugs
in the struggle to be last
to be the winner
to lick its message in time’s sands

Beached words, dying
a dead heavy mass, disconnected from home
by ancient memory –
memories of glory and honor
swelling up in the breast of man, robust
like zombies rising from long unmarked graves…

Oh, look! Here comes Pride,
a bullet in the brain fixes that fuck,
sends it back to death, and there’s its brother, Patriotism
a neckward swing of the ax
re-inters that retro-necro-shit

Duty bound by bonds of progress
we are
to terminate these terrors
wherever they return to life,
for if left ignored, a slow shambling virus
feasting upon all hopeful prospects of the future
will return us to darkness
to unenlightenment
nothing more again than the living dead
a horrible history reborn
the same old show, over and over ~~
one that wasn’t any too good the first time around
LOST in syndication,

f
o
r
e
v
e
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Until Soon

Only the dead have lived
And the living will in their turn
for having had the audacity of getting born
waking, working, wearing slowly out
in the most horrible of ways… repetitively
unimaginatively, mundanely
Ordinary in their lives
plain in their deaths
loving mother, wife, sister, daughter
she liked to sing and laugh
but spent most of her days doing neither
because rare was the moment to bring either to mind
she will be missed
until soon