four more prose poems: poems from a news-ticker or a collective social personality disorder OR poems about other things/fragments for daddy/santa cl

...aus/ chuck e. cheese/NASA

Panel

Nothing but chair-songs, she said. She board-style. This is academic Rigor mortis. Sidestep my too-high chair. Lick my face with your rock candy tongue. Feel the burn baby. Let me remind you. I can’t eat with these sutures. Indian sunburn, up and down her arm. That’s the Natural American Spirit! A committee. Render me: useless, a judgment, a drawing:: a boy, half hair, half molten, tree-tight, lite-bright, yard sale-style. We are wholesale deformities.

Style

what hat fits this heat? I would like to be ocean liner for a day. keep the tears to a minimum. we are crying softly into coarse pillows. don’t let the dirt in, oh no. you let it in. coat my gelatin face with dirt blush and let us have a pinecone war. we are the children of immense and intolerable violence. we are the tolerant generation. why no makeup today? the maquiladora factories kept me awake all night. we must protect this house. breakdown.

Liner

sink-style left of the ocean. we must protect this pool from angry politicians. stereotype man says line-her up and let-her rip. write me a letter that contains: misguided statements of love, hyperbole, some symbols universally understood:: a child with a too convex belly, disfigured hands of a woman in her twenties::: she is at least forty given American standards. the gold standard.

Angry

A rumbling in the holly bushes. A livening. She said he said a mighty mess was made. We are the bakers, this, our sugar. confectioner-style. powder me up and lets get going. A prickle for a nickel. don’t be cute. Emanating from the bush this is my demesne, leave! She said, a lisp how cute. Don’t be. Powder songs, jingles, definite edges blurred. We are the most reliable narrators in this domain. a berry, a poisonberry. We are the bakers of the most remarkable boysenberry pies you ever seen and don’t worry ‘bout that spill or the child under the sofa trembling.

prisoner who murdered someone probably

you look at me with the most aching eyes.
the virgin mary appearing on the flat face of a parking deck
perched above the flat city like a flag with only grey stripes. and bird shit
coming down one half.

those blue eyes masking something else which is unplaceable
the grey shock of hair the english coast on the irish sea swept by currents
no now part of your hair is failing and you wrinkle the side of a house made from stones collected from the sea.

sure i have seen your orange jumpsuit.
because you are sweeping up plastic cups along the highway i am driving on.
there are two dogs standing by in case you give up. they have sharp teeth.
sometimes they are used for biting. when you stare into
their oversized black pupils which have no feeling.

there is nothing better than that. i am driving in a car
eating french fries and dipping them into ketchup
scooped out of a hole i dug in the middle of my thigh.

owls are not thinking when they sit still in a tree for three hours.
neither are people, i don’t think at least.
they are watching sunbeams and starting to forget everything from their past.
have you heard the sound a clarinet and a cello make when they play together?
i have heard it when i press down on the accelerator of my car. it is beautiful.

three prose poems

Bear-Love

When the fallout hits we will be hibernating. Sleep being the only place these sentiments can take us. Paw my bear belly let loose the salmon we will run on pads, claws stunting flip-like or flippant. Bear words are less than holy and more than not. Find me snoring by the west cave wall we call brown wall. There the glow will be impossible to bear. Forget aesops fables and eat some silence with me. Spoon fed and well read we reclined.

Fallout

Your skin is my skin sang the gnarled trees. The ears we took for granted the purple air inserted rhythmically head-side. Pick the dry cleaning up with your talons. Are we birds yet? Can you bird song at my funeral. O the syntax we lost in the transitory periods. Use two words liberally and appliqué my face onto my lower thigh. This is not a test my quiet failure this is an exam. The yellow does not wear you well and the family screaming.

Skin

forthcoming in Sawbuck

Shipwreck

My heart went and drowned in the ocean.

From my flabby chest it tore itself out and I couldn’t catch it.

The waves are like bright green playing cards being shuffled.

From the half empty carcass-belly of the island

in the afternoon: Sometimes a sun grew, pinked my malnourished arms;

Sometimes a pelican came, dove into the water like lightning.

My hair is so thin from the pounding surf.

I cradle a worm in my palms and hold it underwater.

I cradle a fish its bones are my bones and it rolls in the sea.

I am waving to airplanes flying too high to see me.

I say good evening over a transistor radio with sand in the speakers.

“Crack crack crack,” goes a mainland DJ, like a flaregun.

Sure the ocean is great, flat and always the same.

We are not like oceans who turn themselves over every day and grow again.

We are puzzled by the sameness and we are swept like sandcastles

into the surf and are forgotten.

Kim Gordon Eats The Last Blueberry Pop-Tart

i touch the roof of her mouth it
feels like a pillow
tossed into a trench full of mermaids
we are linked by hair and there is a cake

i wake up stained with a rattle in my left arm
wishing i had a heart attack when i was nine
just to get it over with like chicken pox
or braces or love and she is standing on the bed

her foot is on my leg i pretend
i am a beard wrapped around her stupid blonde face
but i'm scared she doesn't cry
soft enough to make me want to stop