The Mayans Can Eat A Dick Poetry Series featuring: April Michelle Bratten

My Landlord and the Devil


My landlord looms over the phone-line
like a Shakespearean villain.

As he cackles into my ear,
I imagine he drinks from a jeweled chalice,
and summers in Ibizia where the waters are warm.

He demands more money
from my already depleted bank account.

I'm sorry, I tell him, I am sorry.

I would probably apologize to George W. himself.

Now, with minus signs all around me
and the breath of history growling down my back,
I take to the winter highway.

The devil follows behind me in a pink Winnebago,
tweaking his 'stache and dialing up whores.

He glides over the ice like a pro.

I enter my work building with the swollen body
of a woman who once knew better.

My bra strings barely adjust.

The sun cracks overhead and births a foul moon.
A rare thumping vibrates the room.

I rumble the floors as I maneuver my heavy body
to the window and peek out.

The devil and my landlord lounge on the hood
of the pink Winnebago,
sharing a joint and cranking Metallica.

I wave to them with the naivety of a baby.


Intimacy

In my dream
a zombie tried to have sex with me
on the kitchen floor.

It was all teeth,
crumbs,
rotting limbs,
awkwardness,
and piles of useless flesh.

I woke to find not much had changed
since I went to bed.

The shit still falls from the sky even in reality,
even in the day light.

The afternoon unloads itself
like a horny teenager
deep
into the crevices and holes of my backyard.

The sun is unimportant,
insignificant.

I still walk the rooms like a coward,
a dead person,

sniffing out the meat.

Your organs only become intimate,
useful,

when they sever and separate
from the body.

Happy Joe

I was a mixture of cracked yellow brick
and severed limbs,
paint and crashed fences, femur and scapula,

raw meat.
We would take to the floor of abandoned apartment buildings,
touch hair, and play
with bottles of glue and motor oil,
beer cans and salt water.

I was 19.

I knew everything about vodka and the shoulders of boys.

You liked that.

The first time you came on my tits
your eyes parted like blue birds
leaving the ground.

Tell me what you want.
Your balls pressed my thigh.

I wanted more.

The snow fell in the trees like hammers,
waiting to ice us down.

Now you are married.
Now you go hunting and play with your dogs.

I bet your hands are still the same.

I bet you taste exactly the same.

The Meth Lab Family Friendly Christmas Special (it's about Jesus & your grandparents) featuring: Brian Fugget

Grotesque Finger Puppets

I am the pastor
of grotesque
finger puppets
irresistible groans
& slimy white things
that crash into the windshield
of your Toyota Highlander
during a roadtrip

i am the flaw
in your grandma's linoleum
that vaguely
resembles
the lifeless foreskin
of a circumcised elf

i am the bed sores
& golden showers
that dictate
the law of gravity
in your
gastro-intestinal
tract

i am the
5’ 7” muscle bound
steroid freak
whose hairy asshole
comes equipped
with abnormally advanced
teleportation devices
that rival that
of Captain Kirk’s
USS Enterprise

and if you
rub me the wrong way
i will zap
a set of
permanent
skid marks
straight into
your Fruit-of-the-Looms
that are harder to wipe
than a chalkboard
marred with
magic marker and spray paint

but alas,
all of this could be avoided
if someone was just willing
to finger my puppet.




AT THE NURSING HOME


Rumor has it,
Mrs. Lapaglia
from room 102
has been ostracized
from the recreation hall
for calling false bingos,
& Dickie Kaplan,
that deaf-mute fella
from room 302
who spends every day
splayed on the floor
imitating the gestures
of inanimate objects,
used to be a mime,
& old Louise
from room 252
is accusing
the orderlies
of trying
to impregnate her
with sperm tainted enemas,
& Mr. Padgit,
the retired
drill instructor
from room 182
thinks his neck brace
is a clerical collar,
so he wanders
the halls
like a faith healer,
slapping the forehead
of every resident
he encounters.

Refrigerated whispers perpetuate the revolution

two dozen tongues
are shackled
to a lisp.

all correspondence
freezes
as

a deafening
sibilance
drenches the
carpet
&

8 lbs of headache
sinks into
a vat of
boiling
pancake batter.

the army
will eat good
tonight

even though
the mimes
refuse to
negotiate.




DOOMSDAY CULTS & SKINNY CARAMEL LATTES


6:37 p.m.
the café reeks
of dead matches
& stale cigarettes;
my mouth tastes
like a salmonella sandwich
& all i got is a cold cup of coffee
& yesterday’s paper.

a bible study group
congregates at the next table,
there is at least a dozen of them,
young, tattooed & pierced
sipping on skinny caramel lattes
& cappuccinos; their heads nod
in unison to a chorus of “AMENS”
while their eyes blaze
with pent-up holy-fire
begging to be released.

they join hands & engage in
a round of prayer
that gradually disintegrates
into conspiratorial whispers
stifled giggles
suspicious glances
& i am seized
by a sudden paranoia
& my imagination runs amok:
‘are they a doomsday cult?’
‘are they planting the seeds of
a terrorist crusade for god?’

there is a tension in the air
as one of them points
at a maroon chevy
in the parking lot
& mutters something
about the offensive ‘DARWIN’
bumper sticker & how the owner
is going to burn in hell
& then there is a round
of hideous snickers, amens,
& hallelujahs.

i get nervous & want to leave
but i am too afraid
because that is my maroon chevy
& i don’t want to become the 1st casualty
of their holy war.

DARWINIAN NUNS & THE EMBRYO ORPHANAGE

Atheists
disguised
as scientists
are breeding
Darwinian nuns
in the embryo orphanage
while every night
somewhere
in the world
a remarkable 2.7 million
kamikaze moths
perish
as a result
of dive bombing
porch lights
& contrary to popular belief
9 out of 10
laboratory monkeys
prefer to copulate
missionary style
& an astonishing 35%
of all proctologists
moonlight
as puppeteers
& an even more astonishing
73% of all puppeteers
moonlight
as proctologists.

Ocean Beach Bathroom Observations by: Pantifesto's Porntastic Phunhouse/FM

Ocean Beach. San Diego, CA, Amerika: 10:00am
* * * * * * * *

The Subjects are deposited at the corner of Newport and Cable Street, after dropping acid 10,000 feet in the air over the Chihuahua desert a couple of hours earlier... Voltaire St. is somewhere in the close vicinity. All signs point to east of their location, but they're holding onto gravity by the grains of sand on the sidewalk and the shifty eyes of encroaching pelicans, who only want the weed.

The first stop is the bathroom and the epiphany afterwards, proceeds as follows:

"I'm usually apalled by the amount of filth in there. Today, there is ample toilet paper in the stalls because it's early in the morning and all the street people ain't washed with the entirety of the pink soap in the dispenser yet."

When they finally make it to the beach itself, Subject A writes something down about the woman closest to Subject B's proximity:

Lady in a pink
skirt with your
cat at the beach your
cat on a leash
don't want no
bath in the
ladies room at
the lifeguard station

Subject B is amused by the anecdote, hysterically amused in fact, but is distracted somewhat by a full bladder and the violet reflection emitting from the sun, or the waves, or the sand, or Subject B's photoreceptor cells, which Subject B is convinced have betrayed Subject B in every sense of the word.


Subject B talks about the early 90's hit: The Wizard, starring Fred Savage, Christian Slater, and some autistic kid who never made it farther than "California...California." because that's all the little shit ever talked about...

Subject B can hold it no longer, and treks off to the Lifeguard Station, feeling like a saturated Rimbaud with one leg. Subject B releases.

Meanwhile, Subject A has become fascinated with the catwoman, the cat's bathing rituals and the cat frolicking aimlessly in the sand dunes, AS FAR AS ITS LEASH WILL ALLOW. Catwoman, has turned on her i-pod, wears no headphones, and dances with the cat, AS FAR AS ITS LEASH WILL ALLOW.

The monologue goes accordingly:

Lady with your
cat on the leash
with your chunky
ass in a
yellow sunset bikini

I ain't tryin to
hear no Korn
song right now
put your pink
skirt back
on & quit tryin
to sing it to
me silently.


Subject B returns from Lifeguard Station after crying profusely at the urinal and urinating for what seemed like 2 years, but in all actuality was only 20 minutes.

Subject B relates the experience to Subject A, via telepathy, hand gestures and simultaneous verbal communication techniques. The technique is not lost upon Subject A, who has become incredibly attuned to the little revelations one experiences when frequenting the semi-sanitary bathroom stalls. Subject B saw no such thing. Subject B, peed into a hole in the wall with a bowl of water at his feet. Subject B thinks of Henry Miller's recollections on French Urinals in The Black Spring, specifically A Saturday Afternoon:

Subject B thinks of his own life:

"with intense blues and luminous greens, the life of sin and grace and repentance, a life of high yellows and golden browns, of winestained robes and salmon-colored streams"
(H.M.)

"So I finish up, and I turn around and this guy has obviously been standing behind me for the entire 20 minutes, and I got tears staining my cheeks, which I feel like everyone can see even with these sunglasses on. So I go to the sink to wash my hands and there's no soap, or the soap dispenser has evaporated. I don't know, but I'm standing there, my hands are already under the faucet, the place is crowded with tweekers or what I perceive are tweekers, and the only thing I can think to do is sprinkle my eyes with penis water, and split real quick... For a moment, I almost screamed out: You've left me no choice San Diego! You drove me to this!"

Subject A is equally amused by Subject B's bathroom anecdote, which has peaked Subject A's interest once more.

Subject A makes off for the Lifeguard Station, and Subject B wonders if she really has to go that much or is it more or less for the experience and the observations...Subject A admits to nothing, for the moment, but later confides that yes, Subject A did have a full bladder, but Subject A was mesmerized by her previous findings and felt compelled to return to the scene of the crime, so to speak.

The relevance of the evidence was uncanny and well documented:

"Looks like someone shit on the wall in there. The Lifeguards go in and throw cat litter where it had dribbled down...I feel like Dexter, examining the blood splatter pattern of a mutilated corpse...Somebody drew an arrow pointing to the mess and asked: Does it take a real concentrated effort to shit like that on the wall?"

The mystery is never solved. The catwoman has disappeared. The waves have finally broken back, the surfers are leaving and the orange juice is completely gone.

Subject B asks Subject A:

"You down for some fish tacos?"

All signs point to yes...emphatically so.

The acid is still pulsing through their bloodstreams when they get back on the plane, a mere 4 hours later. Albuquerque is colder than usual, as they make their final descent before landing...

With All The Slimy Bases Covered A Review of : Tales From A French Envelope (Catfish McDaris & Craig Scott) By: Frankie Metro

… If money is an iguana eating a jackalope, as Catfish Mcdaris suggests in the short prose piece: Jackalope Condoms, then free books are either named Ana or Jack, and have furry horns sprouting from their scaley spines. Allow me first off, to thank Craig Scott for the new bundle of joy I received in the mail today. Children like this live in the French Envelope Catfish & Craig left out to dry in the deserts of the Independent Press Community.

Warning: Don’t approach this book looking for new spiritual landscapes or cognitive plateaus. Instead, floss your gums regularly, start now if you have to, and be open to a series of prods and pokes.

As you progress, there is a pungent smell of burning meat, or a burning sensation, possibly in the pubic zone if you’re that type of person, that follows you around the house, even after you put the book down. Sometimes the meat is sweetly rancid:

Deep & Deeper
(C.M.)

“The Commanche was fanning that burning meat and chanting. Before long I felt this strange sensation. You know how your hemmorhoids burn, after too many hot peppers? That’s about as close as I can come to an explanation…”

Sometimes the burning is painfully familiar:

Fuck You
(C.S.)

I’m a suicide.
You’re my letter.

You don’t care for responsibility.
You never inform the authorities
of my death.
You meet some douchebag in a bar and
elope to Vegas.

My bones mail you
my middle finger.

Catfish McDaris’ poem:

Willy Gets Chilly

is like a stash of retrospection, finally discovered bobbing along in the reservoir of your toilet, or a dopemine rush that’s justified, tried and true.

Creepy Uncle Willy was the last resort,
but my parents had to go to a funeral,
getting into my pajamas, I noticed girlie
books in the bathroom, I was soon
walking the monkey, Uncle Willy yelled

You naughty boy, now I’m going to spank you…

Blood exploded from his nose & his eyeballs
rolled white like hard boiled eggs, the cops
came & called my folks…

Everyone’s heard the creepy Uncle story; some have written the creepy Uncle poem; (C.M.) exorcises the creepy Uncle demons:

…the preacher asked if anyone
wanted to say a few words, I stood & said
he was right, it did hurt him more than me.


Page 43’s poem:

Godzilla Doesn’t Play Butler
(C.M.)

makes the completely ludicrous seem completely feasible, and not only that but also tactfully orchestrated:

I took off all my
clothes & stroked
my lizard until it
resembled Godzilla
stomping Tokyo

Walking into the living
room I set the cake
on the coffee table
I heard a woman
say “Damn”

I asked “Anyone
want meat with
their cake?” a few
hands went up…

while Catfish’s: Tiger Skin Blues is a place where the only difference between magic squirrels and tree rats is the size of your twig & berries:

“Cruz’s heart was broken into a million pieces. Her tears could’ve filled the Gulf of México. Antonio couldn’t survive on ordinary cat food; he hit his eighth life quick. Cruz had him made into a rug and there she slept, until she died of boredom and a lonely heart.”

Ah, Southwest Catfish Cassady & The Bob Dylan Pig Truck Blues…Catfish seems to always be in a race with death; not the death of the body, but the death of the self-image, immersing himself in pig shit and hot sauce on occassion, and hauling ass to Tucumcari or bust.


Taking Down The Shakedown
(C.M.)

is vigilante justice/México City standoffs on public transit/bagmen/cold earth/a hot day/and no supervision:

The México City pickpockets
worked the luxury buses in
wolf packs, razor blades
concealed between fingers

Swift dips of eagle talons
into purses & wallets,
handing off to second men
the watchers ever vigilant…

On page 55, you find that

There’s No Cure For True Love
(C.M.)

and this is an adverse reaction to domestication; an unspayed, unneutered, ill-tempered jackalope, with two hyper-active sex organs, who cares nothing about the topic:

“You ask what would reduce a man to such worm like behavior? Did she have beauty, intelligence, a great body, a pleasant personality? No, an emphatic no, to any of those good qualities. She was a cunt in every sense of the word. She squandered his hard earned money, cheated with every man stupid enough to screw her. She had body odor and bad breath…”

When you’re finally:

Face To Face

with his contribution to this book, the color coated, hairy flavored slime trail it’s left on your tongue is hard to describe, but in the company of Catfish, you find out Jeffrey Dahmer’s been standing across the page, and you’ve traveled just a stanza or one paragraph too far down a dark alley.
* * *

You turn the corner, and Craig Scott’s portion starts off like a free dance at the strip-bar, followed by a private show wth no panties or bra.

The poem:

Bachelor Party Guidelines

reads as a continuously revised string of advice, completely unheeded of course, but unabashedly acknowledged all the same:

You can impregnate,
but make sure it doesn’t
come to term.

You can bring it to term,
but don’t claim it
as your own.

You can claim it as your own,
but don’t spend any time
with it…


The Other
(C.S.)

is a full scale model of the late Todd Moore in drag, a hairy kneed poem with silk stockings and a .38 Snub-Nose…holy, ripped, ready for action:

Don
was too
busy
staring
at Petal’s
tits
to notice
her pulling
the 38
snub
out from
under
the pillow.
One was
half
the size of
the other.
Her nipples
got hard
when she
shot him
in the
balls

Craig seems to pry his characters from the steel reinforced confines of oversized tuna cans in some instances; cans containing wet pink flesh, cans with serrated chew marks on the label, cans with chunks of stem cells… chaotic, suck-fucking hybrids that blame their idle hands, which never fully developed.

He sleeps with would-be assassins when The End is near:

“My left eye feels like a balloon filling with water. We fight and fuck and ignore the cat vomit in the bed…”

giving them the choice of either the crow’s nest or the wet spot in the bed.

By the time you’re left with the question:

Why
(pg. 156)

she is the only answer you have left:

why is it
she’s had tits since 12
known how to suck a dick since 13
how to eat pussy since 9…

why is it
you haven’t known her forever
but yet you have

She is tucked neatly at the slimy base of a French Envelope. There is still time to save her, before the glue really dries…

Simply Brutal Series featuring: Michele McDannold III. OF III.

from THE DEATH BOOK

POEMS TO CELEBRATE MY FRIENDS, PEOPLE I KNEW OR HEARD OF, AT LEAST ONCE, AND THEN THEY DIED OR WILL DIE AND I WANNA BE PREPARED:

“For your information gangsta poetry in this country isn’t Bukowski’s invention, it’s mine. I’ve been making this kind of stuff since 1970 give or take. And, it has nothing to do with Bukowski’s style or subject matter. Bukowski was the pornagrapher of pussy and a damned good one at that. I’m the pornographer of violence.”
-TODD MOORE-(www.m-etropolis.com/wordpress)

stop sucking on Todd Moore's Dead dick

ode to the bullet-wielding
gangster
dillinger dogma
poems I don't get
but ur take of them
is worse
or ur take of him is worse
I guess
I never knew him
or you
but feeling fully qualified
to pass judgement
in poetic form

I find it
sickening
pathetic
and sucking his dead dick
well,
it's just in bad taste
(end poem)

the corpse of Tim Murray

still has reddish hair
and wears glasses
like heaven in a cup
smells like pumpkins
and whip cream
don't judge me for
sniffing his sweater vest
i'm lost on the highway
between Popesville
and Agnostica
Broncho John
is weeping




when you're gone

let there be hamsters for all
and depends undergarments
just in case
may there be poetry grenades
sloshing around the room
til we're all sloshing
to that private tune
that drives Danny's Big Banana
I have never sent a poem that rhymes
to anyone else that matters
and when you're gone
I still won't tell
that one secret
but I can't speak for that
guy sleeping/not sleeping
on the chaise lounge
he
will probably tell

Simply Brutal Series featuring: Michele McDannold II. of III.

this bored housewife

plots death by poison on odd days
mornings only
when the kids are gone
and the crock pot's set to high

cuts the hair from your head during the full moon
binds it with duct tape to a piece of ham
while the street is dark
and the dirt is warm

handles
rather than controls
the desire for witch-inspired zombie sex

urgharghblah

this bored housewife
has a recipe book
that's time-locked
with a tequila switch

she's just waiting
waiting
waiting
til she can't anymore


Epic

my epic poem is a list of groceries
sorted by things I can buy
generic and not
the hero is a box of Pop-Tarts
because let's face it
nobody else can get the filling right
you get the picture?

next to my bed is
the stepford wives
ear plugs
and a basket of lubes, lotions
and creams
for not having sex
for not looking younger
for not healing
the hole in my head

Note to the Better Half

I miss the smell of mass deviation
of latino santa sweat
and artie's chronic n gun oil
I miss the pulse of drunk transit at 3am
black hookers in white wigs
and white pimps in purple satin
I miss the homeless junkies
and the rest stop houses
with sound systems
too big to fit
and fuckers too drunk to shoot, not fuck
I miss the rain that flooded my car
the stink that followed
and the body parts that washed up

yes, I miss being in love
on the run
and even pawning my only diamond
someday soon they'll be a note void of tears
and dinners in the icebox
that freeze a lot better than I do.

Simply Brutal Series featuring: Michele McDannold I of III.

Cash Business

Don’t send it
the waxing poetic
is a stick fuck
if I imagined in colors it would be
black and blackblue
if it had feelers, velvet
and punk renditions of showtunes
it’s true that I paint it up to avoid reality
and it’s ugly like that
I suppose that’s the point
in the end
everyone pays for truth


Trick

We were loaded...
skimmin’ down Morton Ave.
at 4 am,
searching for the end of the fog
where the neon light calls
Takhomasak

you had a counter seat,
cup o’ Joe,
the crumbled-up bag at your feet.
laughin’ through your story
drop of coffee in your `stache.

“... so he pulls up and says
he’s got a bag of canned food for a date.
Ain’t that shit funny?
Check it out! I ain’t kiddin’.”

Juicy brown spit flying on pocket amusement.
(Flo caught it on her uniform sleeve, mortified)

A split-second, maybe a full-tick–
a moment between those two
like the liquid in the torpedo shaped plug in lights
blob o blob, floating, suspended.
Realization squirming up uncomfortable mechanisms
of fate blown anguish.
Curtains up. Omega!

I wasn’t sure who to feel sorry for.

disclosure

doesn't it just suck shit that I am not cool. I am not the idea of your black death suck. there is no breathing demon blood in vain. and, well we don't sell happiness here either. got out of that business long ago, but I do believe in magic and since I can find peace in that joy; silly will do. I think I'll be alright.