Cock Bar Blues

Me and five of my closest
stuffed and blown up buddies.
Poker night at the Cock Bar, all-in.

I’m stinking of old stolen booze
and praying for a flush draw;
The Sentinels lost today.
I’m in the hole two and one half K,
it’s highway robbery, my stone-faced players.

Poker night at the Cock Bar, I’m all-in.

Staring down at my two, my three,
the giant clitoris I piss from.
And it all rides on the river, I’m drowning
slowly.
Nobody’s moved.
The terra cotta mud children.

Poker night at the Cock Bar, I’m in,
all-in.

I call on the Gods of flop,
“Don’t fuck me over
like that time
in Choctaw roulette.”
They do not answer.

Nobody has moved—
I look at them, they stare back,
I crack, “Why won’t you talk to me?!”

I finish three high and walk out
with my cock between my legs
and swear it’s the last time I trust
any plush bastard with an accent.

untitled

Rest
found in a solid rock,
my ass on the polished surface.
It’s neither cold nor warm
and the tatters in my pants give way
under my falling eye lids;

I haven’t slept, have not eaten much,
between yawns I let out grey smoke
wishing more of it.
Wondering when it’ll turn a sweet white.

It is that thing I hate the most,
that awkward phase between phases
that separates life’s crucial moments,
periods of apprenticeship that dare drain me
until I am myself white and leathered in skin,
until I am put in the way of that sea
of cars and countless people and finally
feel myself soften, or, at all.

Wake up!  Take back!

But every thing here is mine
and what is not will soon be, now
to lift this stone up and out of here
before the cold front returns
to wipe it all clear from my memory.

early years kaleidescoped

I learned from beautiful people,
through their filtered genius
and the worst parts of them.

I would look from the sides
and when it was clear
we’d throw our empty bottles,

shattering them on the path freshly
walked that same old way.
We learned aloofness; the convenience

of wealth disbordered;
void of adjacent distractions.
Our heads put through glass comfort

in the gutter we’d—my friend lost an arm
but made good for everything—excelled.
Beautiful.  Beautiful people.

They taught us benevolence
shaped in their image
most comfortable, aloof; damaging.

We were dejected, but reinforced
like every Confederate man, tied up
on display, dead or, almost, maybe [?]

Breath smoking with the cold
desert eagle at night,
forgetting the names of our unborn kids.

So it was learned:
to be safe is to hide; Safety is hidden and sought—
in the backwoods—in the anonymity
of face-down in the gutter.

Last Island

In the Hundred-Year flood,
as the North Valley fills,
I stand at the top of the hill.

The cracked roads bubbling / gasping
at last, the willow draped over us
like the lightest of weeps.

My mother sleeps, here in ashes
in the roots of this monster,
she is here where I should be.

Sleeping as if for ever
and the smallest hint of it—
in even seeps from its case.

I return where
the fate I made will culminate here
in a consumption;

a consummation.  

Let us call it Genocide
For A Family Name.  And
without revealing to each other

the grim expanse; in keeping
with our self-destruction;
we hold our breaths at the end.

Ode to One Thing Wicked

As I turned on my hall light
there he was again as when
we were.

I had salted the snail
and the son of a bitch
for three years chased me.

I could always end him in sleep
and loved my senses.
The remote blinking with me

the blood rushing his eye backs,
and on its way through the wind pipe
snap neatly like rats’ necks in lucky traps.

This wore down the nights;
at first good and then more
and more gross,

impending, relevant;
the counter-clock for Second Coming.
I won’t tell you my drill

but when I did it,
it was finally, wholly horror—
and not silent.  Not at all;

he screamed and I came
running to it, dripping
like a Pavlov bitch in a bell jar.