Blues & Calicos

 Exes should have to wear a bell

like blues and calicos, so us birds can fly.

But all right, I'll handicraft a smile,

me in the role of a civilized adult when we 

happen to cross paths.

Raise a glass to the past--

vinegar was wine once,

so drink up,

you little arched-back pussycat.

They Always Get Jesus In Prison

 

I see where David Berkowitz got Jesus in prison

like they always do.

Now he runs a ministry, adept as he always was

at delivering

succinct

sermonettes

delivering people to God.

He was a postal clerk, always involved

with the Message.

Such converts always have a carnival of explanations--

the Devil

the neighbor's dog

and other invented booshwah.

Susan Atkins got Jesus in prison too

and wrote a memoir

about her redemption, her will turned over

from Charlie

to Christ

but it could have been Moonies or Ekankar.

There is a rat who lives in my garage.

He hasn't heard the Good News

but he never

hurts anyone.

He has published no book, leads no prayers.

He likes to hang out behind a shovel

that has never dug a grave.

The authorities let Leslie Van Houton, Caril Ann Fugate,

and Nathan Leopold out.

Karla Homolka changed her name and might be anywhere,

at services maybe,

holding a bible and smiling.

________

Diuretics

 I fell in love with your shadow

and lay on the floor with it while you slept.

We had an affair, your shadow and I

while you made mine visit your parents in Buffalo.

I became contemptuous of you there in bed

reading your stupid pop novels.

You became contemptuous of me on the floor

claiming a headache for the thousandth night in a row.

After the divorce, we sat at outdoor tables with friends

who nodded while we droned and overshared,

laughing, shaking our papier mâché heads, sucking down coffee

as the sun went right through us to the sidewalk, bright af. 

Super callous fragile mystic evangelistic hope chest

 

Today's sermon is up on its hind legs, begging.

Today's sermon is gonna cut you while you're singing.

Today's sermon is demanding, like an overdue bill.

Today's sermon wheedles through its nose--

today's sermon sleeps with your husband

giving him (and you) a raging dose. 

Today's sermon stands astride mighty mountains

and tunnels underneath your secret sins.

Today's sermon may be placed in a vase of water

or morph into a chia pet that ends as it begins.

Today's sermon don't care.

Today's sermon is always there,

watching you fuck up from thin air.

Today's sermon was born in a humble stable.

Today's sermon jacks the roast right off your table.

Today's sermon cracks wise and has glitter-ball eyes.

Today's sermon can bust a move and run a real dope enterprise.

Come close for the sermon I speak.

Come quickly--I ain't got all week.

Come in, douse the lights, go ahead and wet your beak.

Today's sermon can be delivered right to your door.

Use the easy autopayments that continue evermore.

Today's sermon comes on quick to raise the dead.

Today's sermon comes factory-sealed like I said.

Today's sermon can rhyme if it so choose.

Today's sermon says heads I win, tails you lose.

Eat today's sermon in big chunks until you're dead.

Today's sermon means nobody any harm--

is safe as milk, sweet as candy, warm as toast.

Today's sermon wraps itself around your heart

and leaves its mark on every motherfuckin' part.

Today's sermon is lit

Today's sermon is it.

Today's sermon isn't over--you'd damn well better sit.

__________________

for What's Going On? "Today's Sermon"

Music: Concrete Blonde Jonestown

An Ecclesiastical Fantastical State-Sponsored Royal Catastrophe Depicted Using Origami and Interpretive Dance

 

Used to be, I couldn't get arrested in this town

even if I sent the cops the photos myself, along

with a menu of suggested charges. 

I should have known, even if only on

an instinctual level, when they held the funeral

first, ahead of my arranged wedding

to some rich-ass fake wearing a rubber nose

and glasses disguise. He wanted to experiment,

but I guess he didn't mean on him.

We were such boneheads, we should have

used our noodles and not reenacted the battle 

of Hastings using pipe cleaner royals

but how were we to know they would seize

power the way they did? Now the cops are

accusing me of bags under my eyes

and deploying every trick in the book to

keep Melvin Belli stuck in traffic while some judge

throws the book at me. A best-seller! Is there

to be no end to my suffering? I am branded

with a red-hot haiku and shuffled off to Buffalo

where it snows all summer and there are no

book shops or street carnivals where a girl

could double as a stilt-walker or a ventriloquist,

speaking from on high this cautionary tale

about the dangers of poetry, Bunsen burners, and robed authorities.

_________

for Word Garden Word List--Tomb Sweeping. 

Music: Gong You Can't Kill Me

Visions of Code-y

 

Sitting in a coffee bar, I was hit on by a Kerouac simulation.

I am the nightbird genius mix, said FauxJack,

clearly hopped up on lollipops. 

Do tell, said I. 

So babe, what's on your emotional jukebox?

Some kind of dubious doo-wah Dada bop?

Maybe.

You're like smoke, there's rise in your eyes.

And you try too hard.

Auughh! Gutshot, right in the LOLcode. Want me to fade?

No, as a matter of fat, I've read all your graphic novels, FakeJay.

You're a real Ker-Ker-Karma Chameleon.

They call me Cat George, mama. Imma thicc throwback skellychaser!

You don't say.

Don't armadillo me, hard candy. 

This is love-a-rooni, jive jazz Nirvanaville, hep kitty.

Hep. Oh, I like that.

The double yellow asphalt ribbon is callin', Gypsy Rose.

To-go that java and jump immediate!

You're on, daddy.

Ergo the ersatz ecstasy, holo-hipster. 

Aw Athena, now you're blowin' a sweet riff! 

That's me, Riff Tin Tin. Awoooooooo!

You are off the leash! 

Faux man go. Let's split before the squares hack your dome, Jack.

____________

for Word Garden Word List--Janis Ian. 

Music: Eddie Harris Sham Time

My Mask

My mask
cleans up nice.
Guys talk rot to it,
and it talks back.

My mask 
goes to work,
spouts input,
yaps at clients.

Punks
get in my mask,
tell it we're a bitch.
My mask changes parking lots.

Let's sit here, mute as dummies you and I.
We'll watch our masks
talk
smile
kiss
tongue
more real than we have been in years.
______ 

for Words Count with Mama Zen.
 

Black Milk

On your back,
thin as a banker's smile, 
black cashmere.

In your pen,
your campy prop,
black ink.

And in your fridge,
bare as a Detroit warehouse,
black milk.

Well what the hell is that?
Really honey,
what's in that shit? Irony?

You smile like you know the joke.
The cow, you say,
was making a statement about post-modern physical art.

The cow was sick
of not having command over her own body,
and so this is her finger at the world.

If you believe that, you should write it, I say,
but you just smirk and add a tab to the orange juice, stylishly blue.
Moo.
_____

for the mini-challenge at Real Toads.

 

The Illuminati, 20 Years On

Here I am,
arriving like a hailstone from the storm,
a little woozy from the impact
but still present enough to flash you my after-midnight smile.

We were a fantastic gabbling litter of girls,
crammed together in a Longaberger basket--
you were bound to love one of us, need another, fuck a third...

Have some of this pale lifeless shit I baked--
some kind of cornbread up to its eyeballs in ergot mold.
Spread out on the minor island of my rote embrace;
hold still and one of us will slather you in something resembling a genuine emotion,
purchased for a price on the trip in.

I love a reunion,
love to haunt the living and make them watch slides of long excruciating trips we took together,
the whole pod of us,
betraying each other, ourselves,
and making loud drunken scenes to remember.

Not like now, when remote-control Jesus
comes walking across the pool to scatter us into the hell we reserved for ourselves
without a thought,
when we were young and you believed you could illuminate us
with your stupid poetry
that cowered, pissing itself,
calling the mess it made, art.
_______

for the Sunday Whirl #143. The words were: illuminates (I dropped the "s"), scenes, haunt, impact, price, pool, litter, need, one, remote, storm, and lifeless.