alt-shift

17 Friday Apr 2020

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Shadow, love, don’t zone out just now. It takes
you for ages just to respond. “Knock once

for yes, twice for no.” Heh. This ain’t no ex
raising séance, though what is the essence

of this newfangled magic in this daft
plastic box through which I talk to shadows?

Computer crystals make for a queer Craft.
Here be veils no Art can pierce, I suppose.

Is it why the dead don’t ask for our aid?
our love? our connection? What new gospel

speaks for these new times? What laws still govern
this? My soul for Alt-shift is a daft trade.

It’s the only way to reach your spectral,
sorry ass. That’s a touch wretched to learn.

blunder

16 Thursday Apr 2020

Posted by in Disaster –- Pain –- Sorrow, Poetry, sonnet

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Often I wake up sore and bent. Not riled,
but spent. As if I’ve brawled, bullied in dreams

I can’t recall; the rest of this defiled
life spent in memory. No wonder, “screams,”

and, “dreams,” rhyme so easily. No wonder
I can’t recall. I’ve been on either side

of that word: Bully. Dull One. The Blunder.
Special Ed. I thought … I hoped if I fried

my brain enough I would forget; yet hell
is on either side of that, too. What screams

more than, “sorry, dull child, I couldn’t save
you”? I broke you, child; and since to rebel

is to forget that you’re broken, all my dreams
show me, each time, that I’ve never been brave.

brogue

13 Monday Apr 2020

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In bloom. In bed. What is it that brogue brings
to you? Listen, can you hear distant moans?

Gods talk. When the air thickens and then swings
around you, when you feel deep in your bones

a wild itch for something more, that’s language,
love, each curious word. If it were fruit

you’d suck them dry, lick at the wet cleavage
juicy sounds make, each temblor’s bloom. What root

buried itself here? What sublime ache? Bloom,
baby, bloom: disco inferno. Now rogue

gods talk through you; their lexicon unique,
chaotic, but still you know. You know. Womb

words. You speak them. In bed. In your rough brogue.
You’re the translation, love –– what the gods speak.

static

12 Sunday Apr 2020

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Taxing. Distracting. Shimmer down shadows.
I spent hours yesterday … with them … talking …

knowing that they’re shade, not ghosts. Goodness knows
there’s a difference. Goodness knows everything.

This good rush of hope that just once hidden
things would want me. I listen to static

in my ears. I swear, behind that foreign
noise are words. Maybe it’s all a sick trick

just to amuse others. Who? Who knows. “Naw.
‘e’s jist de Doctor.” I’ve heard that before,

but not here, not with light and not-light criss-
crossing on the walls … like I’d grind my jaw

over some daft ghost … daft metaphor …
daft bliss that there’s more to this than just this.

withering

11 Saturday Apr 2020

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Here’s my butter’s phat: “That’s what I look bald?”
I asked as they changed the bandages: charred

pink. The wreckage of my forehead –– each scald
kiss-mark –– filleted skullcap’s split. What reward

is there in surviving? This: you shall name
the myth others will believe about you.

Withering flames traced my cranium’s frame
(ugh) left garlands of gristle. Each sinew

sutured. Each sequence to be read. Primal
as braille once my scalp’s stitches were removed.

“Can I touch it?” Love, I got scars that’ll make
each of your pheromones moan. I’m this dull

pink all over. Crunchy, you might say. Grooved
deep by heat. What the kids call: shake and bake.

deep throat

11 Saturday Apr 2020

Posted by in Erotic, Poetry, sonnet

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“Ye soond loch a byrd,” some goon with a gloat
said of my junkyard dog lisp. On the phone

I can drop the tone into my deep throat;
hint of hard strokes, slow slides to steel and bone,

ending with stone-capped slivers, crisp and cracked.
But why? I love my lisp. It keeps saving

me from so much bad sex. Bullies react
to it right away. If my pronouncing,

“th,” gives you pause, then, “vo’chinch,” as Lilith
would say. No cocks to your splatter, buzzards

to your box. No, “rump-rimmed mortars/ well-hung
pestles,” for you, child; just those glib in myth

and tongue twisters. Unlike your clit, my words
tremble all strange and new under my tongue.

][][

NOTES:
Vo’chinch is a most useful Armenian word (the ancient language of mountain gods and high desert witches); sort of like the French, “Comme ci, comme ça,” it can mean anything from, “Damn, what an asshole,” to, “everything is hunky-dory,” depending on circumstance.

disposal

11 Saturday Apr 2020

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Two tabs of Memory, a shot of Mind’s
Eye, and the tsunamis rise. Vile temper

of the garbage disposal, how it grinds
and screams on nothing behind black rubber

teeth. I’ve inched my fingers to that maw. Dread,
though, stops me: once in there’s no coming home.

That’s not love, you said. Odd, you’ve also said
it’s all love. I remember that my own

temper was filled with screaming, with sea storms
wrecking coasts. You tried to temper my muse.

Nothing calms tempests; like the disposal
I still consume all. Ghost hunger deforms

my dread, makes it something that you’ll confuse
for hope, for home, for something beautiful.

fanny

10 Friday Apr 2020

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“Hurts,” you hiss, hoping the moppets won’t hear.
They sleep next to us. This is not new pain,

strange and supreme; just stretching, what Shakespeare
called, “the full length of my wit,” like cocaine

and all of our needs, deep in the, “marl’d earth,”
of your fanny. It’s the expansiveness––

what fear and endorphins bring, this rebirth
between gasping breath, dark realm of Eros

––that I adore. Like wit, not everyone
gets it; my sliding down, squeezing balls deep

in you. I’m a hungry ghost. You’re famished
for love, all love; even as your children

wake, to stare at you twisting in your sleep––
blind that one more time you’re being ravished.

brawling

09 Thursday Apr 2020

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Little death around your lips makes your smile
somehow sad. Little cum on your chin, eye

liner smudged, your love-bitten throat: I’m vile
to my toys, the ones who say yes, the shy

ones who feel a bit queer. Vile with a touch
of slash-and-burn joy, brawling bliss. I’ll salt

the sour earth that you’re buried in. You’ll clutch
at my hips, gag-spit at my cock’s assault

on your throat. I make a foul god, bad dad,
beastly boyfriend, but a good friend to those

who laugh at this. You say sex. I say soul.
We write about all that we’ve never had.

Little death, I’m shy; tad queer with sorrows,
tad sad only words let me lose control.

sick months

08 Wednesday Apr 2020

Posted by in Disaster –- Pain –- Sorrow, Poetry, sonnet

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Last year the sugar-making moon arrived
like my neighbors, who rendered fat, boiled sap,

finished their winter-time tales of how they thrived
in lean months. This April, though, has turned crap:

no sap runs, no tap drips, no urge itches.
The dead keep count of the throngs arriving

and each day passes without cure. “Curses
cest by gods,” some say. “Th’ End is Comin’,”

they say; as if there’s never been horror shows
before; as if spring won’t follow winter.

Maple, ghosts and spigots: “’tis not sugar
‘at kills,” in these sick months … just our sorrows.

Neighbors endure with their tales and laughter
and I listen, lean with this sick hunger.