a man holds
a fistful of pine needles.
The
tattooed pistoleer wonders if the
grapes
under the tarmac provide enough
bounce in
the forests of Azerbaijan. The coolie
responds
and smirks, the emerald in his forehead growing
to massive
and incongruent proportions.
It's all
proportion. Especially when six-fingered
ladies smack
their sweaty ham-hands onto their thighs
in front of
a standing ovation at the Orpheum. The
Georgians
don't like it. But, the helmet-clad
spirits
wish that they had the fruit that fell from the
tired old
Joshua tree. That’s what they think.
Chalk one
up to the misanthropes, and plead to the masters
and misers
that control the radio waves that
vomit forth
from the pulsar. It's all proportion.
Take the
shiny blade that the kids want from the
catalogue,
because there’s numbers to be had,
hidden in
the hidden angles. Believe what the antennas
give to the
people when their faces grow hair and their hair
grows
faces. Make it and break the “it” that it controls.
Play the
woodchuck song, Frank. The sun went nova.
Nothing
left but proportions.
Bitter Yolk
of an Angry Moon
Mundane, a
pugilist lashes out
at a bitter
protagonist,
confident
in his swelling
pride and
swelling face.
Three old
men watch on. Their
gray skin
hangs in folds
as they
cackle and clap.
A drop of
blood hits the middle man.
A sainted
hunter pokes
the yolk of
his egg, which seeps
like a
septic wound. The blue
Montana sky
behind him laughs
at his
wardrobe of hair shirt and jeans.
In the
distance, a coyote waits and dreams.
I sit and
watch as the clown mocks my sight. His
one blind
eye reveals a twinkle under its
filmy
membrane. He yanks out the offending
orb,
offering it to me as sacrament. I feast.
A child squeezes
his favorite hamster
until it
stops twitching. In the living room,
his mother
lays silent and blue.
A general
breakdown begins as the moon
goes dark
and madmen shoot each other
across the
dunes, sick from ocular wafer
hallucinations.
The
disjunction of upper lobes
and
membranes make a final resting
place at
the old stone wall that crumbles
under the
hanging prisoner.
It’s a
bitter and frank discussion as I
speak to my
internal minions that twitch
and breathe
inside me. You call them
tapeworms
but I call them brothers as
we revel in
our symbiosis.
Mary
Perkins and Lester Holt Visited the Wallace Residence Thursday Night
A work boot
with a tuft
of pink
insulation clinging
onto the
end of a brown
and
tattered shoelace sits on
a worn
wooden step in front
of a
burning trailer house.
Cicadas buzz
as a shadow moves
across the
hot and broken
glass that
rests and winks
on the
sun-baked ground.
