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Wednesday 22 February 2012

David M. Buhajla-

A Brief Understanding of What it Means to be Lucid


Fourteen feet under the rocky overhang, 
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.


David M. Buhajla is a writer and poet living in Arkansas with his wife Marci and his daughter Maya. His work is available in Counterexample Poetics, Sex and Murder, Danse Macabre, Rose and Thorn Journal, The Gloaming Magazine, The Horror Zine, Death Head Grin, The Very Good Bad Comedy Show and the “Winter Canons” anthology from Midwest Literary Magazine.



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