POEMS

MY BANK STATEMENT

(Published in Mad Swirl)

When your woman doesn’t seem to remember
All the bad jokes you told the night before,
When you’re not embarrassed to pay for your gas
With a hand full of nickels,
When you overdraw from your bank on purpose
And then you have to borrow money to pay for the fees,
When you’re glad that all your CDs are scratched,
When you try to sleep through the day,
But cant, because your neighbor is mowing his lawn,
When being tired
Is the sweetest way to feel when you are awake,
When you get homesick
But not for home or anywhere else,
Because just barely moving
Makes you feel
Like you’re already there.

4 POEM$

(posted on Alternative REEl)

YOUR SOUL IS FILTHY

I’ve never liked perfumes
I like feet to smell like feet
And armpits to smell like armpits
And pussy to smell like pussy
(and I like my cock to smell like pussy as well)

I feel the same way about my soul
I want my soul
To smell like a soul
To feel like a soul

to have all the bruises
all the stretch marks
all the untamed hair
a soul should have.

I want it
to spend too much money at the strip clubs
to watch rocky movies when it should be sleeping
to go the distance
to have the eye of the tiger
to crave
to feel nostalgic
to grieve for
everything
even the things it hasn’t experienced yet


________________________________________

TOILET PAPER


Toilet paper is more helpful than poetry

But I prefer poetry.

When you finish a book of poems

you can put it on your book shelf,


problem is

most the crap I read

is so bad

it should be flushed down the toilet

And I seem to be out of toilet paper

________________________________________

FOR LEWIS

He bought us margaritas
And we all cheered.

I had known this savage for a long time
He was kind of a sissy.
He always had this
Soft
tender
scraped-knee of a soul

he talked like an old woman.
Even as he fed us these margaritas
He made us feel like
we were being given milk and cookies
by somebody’s grandma.

(you know what I mean
Double stuffed, mint
Oreo cookies,
The type of thing that I avoid
Cause they’ll make the man-tits
Grow a cup size)

He loved cookies
He was a big fatty

And gentle and
Looked like
he could get his ass kicked by anything

Except the ocean.
He was a fisherman.
He’d go out
Into that big old ocean
fish
And then
He’d come back, pay rent, hit the bars
And buy us all margaritas

He’d get drunk and sentimental
Start talking about my mom
And his grandmother(who raised him)
And about how they were both dead

And he’d get sad

He was always sad as a kid too
And like all sad kids
He was bullied a lot.
I got into my first fight over him
(And luckily it was my last one
Cause I got my ass kicked)

Lewis died a few years ago.
A drug overdose.
He was living in North Carolina.

I didn’t like that he had left our home
and started fishing somewhere else.
It made me homesick for him
(funny
how people like me
think the ocean belongs
To the land it breaks against.
My friend, Lewis, was a fisherman
And I’m sure he knew better than that)

________________________________________


BUKOWSKI VS KEROUAC

I tried to set up at battle
Between
Bukowski and Kerouac,
But they
Just ended up getting drunk
And passing out.

Neither of them were easy to deal with
Even in their sleep

Kerouac
Made a lot of noise
He talked in his sleep
He rambled on
About Buddha
And the void

Then
He started pretending to play the saxophone,
Which actually looked more like
He was trying to suck his own dick

Bukowski slept next to him
He snored, farted, woke up
Puked, took a bath, started drinking
Took another bath
Drank some more
Then wrote a few poems
kept drinking
so on...

when he was done
He shoved the poetry
In Kerouac’s mouth
To muffle
The crazed gibberish
He kept mumbling

There was no waking Kerouac
He
Was stuck
And drowning
In his own wet dream.
poor bastard…

I guess
Bukowski won
By default

TRYING TO BLEED THROUGH THE RIGHT WOUND

(published at madswirl.com)

The hung-over colors of a sunset
The neutered smile I give my boss
my reflection
wants to reach out and slap the shit out of me
and tell me to stop fondling my own man boobs

but I’m tired.
there is so much to do

All those jobs to quit
All those dollar tacos to devour
All those beer cans to be redeemed

Because I’m the type of man who refuses
to do things the way they are supposed to be done

I don’t wait for winter
I make snow angels in cigarette ash, and
In the foam of the ocean, and
In the pubic hair of a crazy woman
in wrinkles of my last dollar.
This is how I live

Look at me!
Look at this manly body!

I’m fat as hell
There's diet soda in my veins
bacon egg and cheese beating in my heart
and my brain is stuck in a 7-11 parking lot
with wet pavement as deep as an ocean and
late night lights blistering and popping and oozing

And the sky looks as soft as cement
And as gentle as a scorpions ass
I stand under it in nothing but my underwear,
cursing at the gods,
saying thank you
for taking me where I did not Want to go

TUMBLE WEED SEX DRIVE

(Published In Lit Chaos)


When I was young

Anything could

Get me off



Smoking a cigarette

I had found on the ground

Was a party to me



And staying up

until four

in the morning

To watch star trek

Was living in the

fast lane



I’ve jerked off

to some strange shit.

I used to jerk off

to my biology text book.

When I was done

I would to lie in bed

for hours

Hungover with guilt,

feeling like a cannibal



And to this day

I still can’t tell

Whether sex

is supposed to make us

Remember

that we are just animals

Or help us forget,



All I know

is those damn diagrams

of the human body

made me feel lonely

Way before

I knew what loneliness was.



so, here’s to science.

i just want to say

Thank you,

You were the first

Cold hearted woman
i have ever known


THE FIFTH GOSPEL

(published in spilled coffee and in mad swirl)

editor's note(from mad swirl): Aha! Here is a mad, rambling statement of faith I can underline with a grand, "Amen!" I go to that church, too. I don't see anything holy about assholes, either. - mh

I believe in lying in bed with my boots on.
I believe in airplanes and turbulence and
Hornets nests and neurotic old women,

I believe in making to-do lists
And then
Not
Doing anything on
The list

Or:
If I really want to feel productive
I make a list
filled with things
That I have already done.

Example of a to-do list
by Justin Grimbol:
Sleep in
Wake up
Jerk off
Fight with woman
Eat breakfast
Check email
Take piss
Write poem


I like poems.
They’re short.

most poetry isn’t very good though---
you got guys like Ginsberg talking about
how holy their assholes are.

I like ass. I love ass.
I got
A cramp
in my neck
from staring at
So
Much
Ass.
But
That
Doesn’t mean
There needs to be something holy about it
Ass is good enough as it is.

Sure
Some are better than others.
Some

Are impossible to not get a little religious about.
Some stay in your heart
Like a stun gun
Like a blizzard
Only it’s warm
It’s the inventor, the mad scientist
of all warm things.

I believe in warm things
I believe in sweating
I believe
That people only smell good when they smell bad,
I believe in lukewarm pizza

I always believe it’s going to be a warm winter
Until the first snow fall,
Then I hide in my room
Terrified.
I put my hands under my woman’s breasts and pretend they’re mittens.
the weather channel says we should be expecting 16 inches of snow.
It’s going to be a long winter.


When I was a kid
I felt warm in the snow.
Hell,
I felt a lot of thing back then
That I don’t feel now.
When I was a kid
I actually believed that if you beat a video game
That you’d be rewarded with money
That it would come pouring out of the Nintendo
like it was a slot machine.
Why else would they make the games so difficult?
Why would people play these ridiculous games
Unless there was some kind of reward at the end?

I believe in that kind of passion
I believe in how your thumbs hurt
when you played Nintendo for too long.
This poem was written with those same thumbs
I believe in thumbs and chaffed legs
And stretch marks and pregnancy scares
And running out of gas
And all the scratch off tickets that are buried
Under the front seat of my car.
I believe in all those things that make you ask
Was it worth it? And then you shrug your shoulders
Because even if it’s not worth anything
You’re going to keep at it anyway.
You just can’t help yourself.

AN AMERICAN PICNIC

published in MAD SWIRL (madswirl.com)

We sat on the porch of my fathers house
and watched the storm roll in.
At first it was just a flash in the distance
Then
The wind picked up
It began to rain
The thunder became louder.
And I sat there and I drank my diet Pepsi
And she smoked her joint.
A bolt of lightning lit up the
The front lawn and we both jumped back
we got scared,
we wanted to hide
but by the time we had decided
to retreat back into the house
the storm already passed
leaving us with nothing but the softening rain.

From inside the house
we could hear my step mother calling for my father.
She had rheumatoid arthritis
and she had a hard time getting up from the couch.
it didn’t take much to make this woman feel helpless.
She kept calling for my father
Asking him if the car windows were rolled up.
we could almost hear him ignoring her.
if he was actually asleep he would have been snoring.
It was almost like we could hear him
But really all that could be heard was my step mother's yelling
and the fading sound of distant thunder coming from the passing storm

SHE HAD A BEAUTIFUL BUDDHIST BODY
published in Spilled Coffee

"i'm buddhist!" she screamed,
and then she looked at me and she roled her eyes
i
didn't seem enlightened to her,
because i
was so drunk and pussy hungry.

"i love buddha!"
she screamed.

and the rest of the hamptons
and all those sexy rich women that had
been marinated in yoga
and
soy milk
hovered
like a cluster of fairries
singing rich
sweet
songs to each other.

one of those fairries took a shit
and that shit
landed on my shoulder
and it sat there
looking very
mindful.
(maybe it is a buddhist too,
i thought.)

"i go to yoga three times a week!"
the woman screamed.
"look at you.
you are fat and smell like booze."

i looked down at myself.
my shirt was stained with beer
and my gut looked
like a baby
was in there
lying on a sofa
wearing sweat pants
eating a pint of ice cream
and watching porn
on a wide
flat screen tv

this woman
and the fairy shit on my shoulder
had definitely figured something out.
they both seemed
to be living a life much better
than mine.
still, i didn't want to be like them.
not one inch of me wanted what they had.
as far as i was concerned
being enlightened made you an asshole
and i preferred my fat ass to walk home
as drunk and confused and tired as ever.

When We Talk About Love
published in THE PARK BENCH MASSACRE

How’s living in the city? they ask
And, like all hip young new Yorkers,
He tells them
It’s great.
It’s always great. I love it
And he brags about his job and his woman

But that is not real love
When you really love something
You don’t brag
You say
she’s driving me crazy
She’s a god damn nag!
You say
I cant take anymore.
Those are the words of love.

When you love something
You act stuck
You say
This town is a trap
Nothing ever happens here
You say

God damn
this thing never works.
Because we love machines.
Its seems warped but its true.
But only realy love machines
when they malfunction
That’s what gives them life.
We don’t say
Oh, I love that thing
It works like a dream
Because that is not real love.
Instead we say
That car,Sure,
It’s a piece of shit,
But
I’ve
been driving it
for the past ten years
And
it hasn’t given out on me yet.
That is real love.