Heaven is a Sitcom
When the elevator comes to take me away,
I hope the space-time secretaries
have the gall and the tits to
jam acrylic nail into button number
Oh god yes please!
comb my hair and press putty to my teeth
til all I can do is smile
at the sight of my own reflection
sparkling elevator doors
Ohhhh yeah you’re going places baby
I cry out to linoleum and second rate steel
before I get off
at the top floor
where the top dogs
chew me and spit me to
an audience of angels who
laugh before I even breathe,
laugh and it's not even funny,
where the rock economists
measure up my half priced humor
sell me back my soul for double the cost
And in between takes
I go up to the office where
Holy Handsome whispers
laugh tracks in my year,
leans up real close,
his tongue a worm that burrows in my brain,
slurps up my salvaged sentences
and throws them back up
into something worthy
of infinite eyes
(2025)
anything else?
yeah i’ll get an iced latte and a taste of something beautiful
with an extra shot from some military musket,
right in the shin to wake me up from this drudgery.
i haven't been surprised in years.
anything else? oh you have no idea.
this hamster wheel heart of mine, whirligig of wanting,
never stops churning for a taste of something greater.
so yeah i’ll get a little bit of syrup, something like sunshine
to distract me from this daily doom-wrapped dwindle.
man, i’m going stale in this display case.
what kind of milk? can’t you see i’m dying here
in some magical made-up way? writhing and withering on this
linoleum floor, dissolving into coffee bean dreams of butterfly wings
that’ll fly me far away from here.
i haven't been surprised in years.
(2025)
Eating the world.
I want to eat the color red. Peel bananas, bite the sunshine, gobble dirt from the ground up, worms have five hearts and I’ll devour them all. I drink house paint like soup, turpentine like tea, turn sand dune to snowcone and pour desert down my throat. I stuff morning news into my mouth, crunch on letters, let p’s and q’s rack against teeth, slip down esophagus, turn stomach to alphabet soup. I eat brains for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, I swallow the thought of stopping anytime soon. I eat speed, I devour distance, I dine on time, I chew the gum stuck beneath high school bleachers. Someone has to do it. I lick bowling balls like lollipops, pop pennies like pills, suck on the metallic taste of someone else’s blood. I feast on fact and I feast on fiction, I slurp down every string of a fresh wound’s stitches. My favorite fruit is Adam’s apple, pear shaped hips, the watermelon that grew in your stomach when you were six and ate the seed and heard the legend and cried about it. I regurgitate danger into the mouths of several baby birds. I’ll have my cake, eat it too, and I’ll bite the hand that feeds me. I ingest your eyes as you read this, and I’ll eat the apology I owe you. And once this plate is empty, perhaps I’ll finally learn to cook.
(2024)
Word Dirt
Spit sick thick goo globs of good-grammared grime
into a sticky mass of unstuck shine,
shorn short of all the ways we peel “love”
from the bottom of our shoes
like gum stuck to pavement,
stuck to the sound of all the words I don’t know,
all the dictionary defined lies
regurgitated into pools of wasted thought
which I slurp back up and spit back out
into jumbles of coffee shop slop
coffee shop talk talk talk
bubbling boiling pools
of the blah blah blah,
of the no, yeah, no, yeah!
when it all begins to taste like
black coffee diluted with the white noise
of those raucous rockets rocking it loud,
those loud mouths drowning in sound,
in conversation, two’s a crowd,
word dirt fouls in my
foul, foul mouth.
And it’s all been said.
And my sentences have begun
to taste like dust
and smell like rot
and dissolve upon contact with unspoken air.
(2024)
Dust Dog Cigarette and the War on Time
The dust dogs dance all warlike
to the beat of the butts of my boots,
watching with hungry eyes
as I run back in time
to catch up with all the fight I’ve missed
crouched ‘round the corner
waiting for someone else’s hound
to howl out the code to the ATM.
And as I count my cash cowering
in the trench between grass and gutter
where the dogs go to piss promises
that we’ll all be remembered in the
mind of a celestial goldfish,
I don’t even feel it as you march your men
through the cracks in my flesh,
too busy trying to recall
the sound of my own voice
as I cough out several yes sir’s
through my four remaining teeth
and howl at the setting sun.
So go ahead and
burn victory into my back
with the butt of your cigarette
and perhaps I’ll win this war,
and forget for just a second
that it’s only a matter of time
before I dissolve into a pile of
dust in your ashtray,
remnants of the words I used
to tell my warlord stories
from several dust storms ago
from the comfort of my dog bed
beside your living room chair.
(2024)
Macabre, Baby!
Television, run the counternarratives.
Research new ways to burn.
Paint your last disasterpiece
baby.
Make my stomach churn.
Smash bottles on the concrete.
Tie chainmail to your wrists.
Fry an egg on my burning lungs
baby.
Start a war then unenlist.
Tell the horses to start running.
Tell the phones to disconnect.
Nail the postman to a crosswalk
baby.
And watch him resurrect.
(2025)
Crusader, You.
Tight clothes & loose morals,
Aching to fight & itching to quarrel,
You’re one pane of glass
In a room full of fists.
Born bleak-blooded,
Strutting star-studded,
Drunk on liquid mischief
In a boozy delicious dream.
Reign slacking, horse backing,
Pistols up, bones cracking,
A sacrifice to nothing:
I never needed a left hand.
The road’s long but
My sword’s longer,
The duel was sweet
But the memory fonder,
Good thing you drew that map to heaven
On the backside of your hand.
This ain’t no two man’s land.
(2025)
You're Here Now
In the beginning there were only hands
that sculpted you from clay and bashed your skull
with stones til they finally got your nose right,
laid love between your limbs and pumped
you full of promise til your every orifice oozed
with an ache for something greater.
As you chewed away the beginning
and the flesh floor that held you,
as the hands that forged your heart from
nothingness dropped you from the sky,
did your teeth still gnash in vain?
And as you rest where you always do,
rotting in God’s green gutter in a shivering heap,
your cracked lips suckling the regurgitated air,
do you miss the cradle or do you miss the meat?
(2025)
Agents of Ordinary
Men in sharp suits, perpendicular to the Edge
Sift seamlessly through subway grates,
Shredded skin reforming underground
To catch the 6 on the hour.
Clustered and clawing, scratching cave drawings
With hairless hands and ballpoint pens
Into government tile, picking earwax from ear pieces, Restless as rats.
Tightening ties til breath is precious,
Opening metal doors, squeaking piss stained floors, Clutching limp dicks and train poles with sweating palms Reciting niceties as tribal chants.
The city crawls above this mass of men
Hurtling uptown toward heaven
Army of acolytes lining up to lick God’s doorbell,
And sell him their antidote to despair.
The men in sharp suits rise like steam
Reforming in several hundred swivel chairs
Bowing to wristwatch prophecy
Tuning sun dial to the fluorescent lights.
A drop of blood has infiltrated the water cooler.
(2025)