Kyle Hemmings-

Mingus I

Mingus swimming in the exhaust of unreal engines, staggered in the double-talk of suicide traders. Thoughts are hard twisted pretzels. After receiving a tip from a hot dog vendor, an ex X-Corps veteran of the Irish Buddha Wars, (hands stained with yesterday's Dijon mustard,) Mingus searches the city for a terrorist's bomb in the shape of heart failure. Or maybe an oversized pippin. He interrogates ex-Go No Go dancers turned white collar mutes. In dim lit rooms, after the jamming of laser copying machines, Mingus has sex with a pharisaic ex-nun. After hissing orgasms, she rattles off names: Pradeep, Andrew Void, Yucheng, Mortimer Leaks. Her eyes reflect the blue-black mania of 30 years in adjacent closets.

What do the names mean? asks Mingus, hope like a young herring.

It means, she says, that all our pasts are rooted in our presents. Can't you see, I'm just a rhizoid bitch clinging to old vows?  

Mingus leaves, hangs a hard right on Moot. 

Mingus II 

Mingus leaves a snitch, who lost her panties to a blind post-Impressionist on Viagra, wailing against the elastic sides of her own bubble. He passes the Sulfate Wards, the Aluminum Ghettos, the Electric Dead, the Brilliant Silence in the core of the North Ward. He descends into increasingly deeper bars, built for the aftermath. Still without answers, but something ticking within his distant spaces, he becomes drunk on Hannibal's Fables & Flaming Rousts. Women's hands turn saurian. Strange men attempt to French kiss him with tongues of white crystals. Mingus breaks glasses, staggers out of the bar, the ticking so loud now that it owns him the way that Maud the Green Hunger woman once did. He thinks: When the bomb does go off, it will turn everyone invisible as if they are all blind.

When the bomb does go off, there is only a casualty of anyone, a bursting of a woman's very personal concrete wall & a ringing of the ears that will stay forever as if the past went aphasic.

Mingus III

Wearing the city's scabs or walking alone in the dark, bruised-eye soul, under gas-powered zombie households. 3-family units, one autistic to every cookie-cutter mom with severe cuts/those look-away denials. The father sheds selves as if pulling sponge rubber gaskets. As a gifted boy of radio frequencies, Mingus is a cash cow of desperately departed ideas. Catching paper planes on the subway. Stuttering in the St. Agnes Choir. Believes in Green Lantern and a gay version of The Madonna. His medications are generic and endorsed by some ex-psychedelic aviators who crashed into Lysergic wishing fields. Some still have their beards or keep being rediscovered as homeless in smokeless post-transit roar Penn Stations. On the streets or cruising open-ended detours, Mingus, all of 17 floating integer years, can detect Strontium in urban gnomes. With just one wrong word, living on tip toe for years, he can ignite spontaneously with human exhaled air.

Kyle Hemmings is the author of several chapbooks of poems: Avenue C, Cat People, and Anime Junkie (Scars Publications). His latest ebook is You Never Die in Wholes from Good Story Press and The Truth about Onions from Good Samaritan Press. His favorite band of all time is Love and he is a big fan of Roky Erickson.  He lives and writes in New Jersey.