Cruel Prince

First he wants to
do his "martial arts"
thing, the jabs, Head
Butts; then I get
teased for Lack
of Manliness. When
I know he just
Needs to be Held.

He laid on his side
with my cat. My
fingers were shiv stained;
the two of them looked at me
like a returnee's Last Chance.
Is it the turtlenecks
that let a man say What he Wants?
Now I do His Bidding.

Illyn
"Born again-- but uglier."

Collar of Skulls

When I close my eyes I can see pricks of light in the pattern of the tiny bud cluster on your ficus. They dim in and out and the tip wags like the shamrock marquee on an old border casino. Death gives you a mask of hurt knowing and the joy of helplessness. I see your face in the thick leaves I sink among to steal a smoke. I feel the backs of your knees and neck and bump the hip string of a loin cloth on my heroic groin carrying you inert out of Aztec Town. Ever since you planted a collar of skulls on my breast, ever since crimson footprints first crossed the wake of the blessed, I been able to get up on my knees, and the rest just pulled itself together. I never knew all the carnage was what my own eyes bled while stomping past the innocent. Monster, our arms rattle round the plexus, so many palms turned up with final gifts, a mill, beacon eating wind. Only your power can make me stop destiny and give in.

Kev's Biggest Wanter

Come Down Mthyuh

I stay up in Pennis, near Ground Bay. There's some RV resorts and a gas station with a POD. They have a golf course and some cows grazing moss on the Dirtiest River in the World. Mondays Mike comes down Mthyuh for feed and takes the pups while I work cement and watch cable at Chank Suites, 60 hours a 4-day week. I drop about two-fifty on booze and groceries and lodge it against the back of the bed. Don't need much hay. Llamas ran off with a minstrel. This is just until he can get a second mortgage or some family help. Then we'll build a fence the girlz can't chew and still have gophers on their plates every day. We used to call it Death Farm 3000 for all the graves. But Mthyuh turns up her babes and they walk away. When the filter's up the sky is clear of pests.

Come down Mthyuh with your truck,
Come down the mountain
Where life isn't measured;
Bring your extended cab full of dogs.

Kev

Salty

If I have cash and I'm willing to pay up now, would you let me offer them a bit less than your mass-mail quote..? No it was personalized, but by a computer printer, that's all. Say 18 percent of the new total including interest..? You could fax me the agreement, and if you'll accept a card tied to my bank account, we can settle this today. What is your percentage, sir..? Because you know if I claim 13, game's over for us both.

Donna leaned back against the tile kitchen counter top in her yellow gauze Charro pijama and farted. A salty peanut shell cracked between her teeth.

No, I'm not swimming in money that's exactly right. All I've got to eat is snack food. OK. Give me a minute to plug it in. I'm a doctor for chrisake. And dog food. Never thought it cost this much. I'm feeding you out of my bitches' mouths, mister.

Dr. Thong had been physician to super shiv-stars and wandering freaks. Now barely able to keep Juniper, La-La and M'Lady in kibble, she wondered if someone wouldn't once slip her a pro-bono, as she had done, on so, so many occasions. Was Kevin on some kind of Jesus trip? He had once, as a walk-in, asked her to put him down. Now he frequented a fiery healing pool.

O' Kev. You could touch my coin purse at least. We bonded on a pill-bottle bed, and that pumping beat. How could I know a lapse of shiv could trigger a random shiv test and set me up to lose my license all for a rotten night of hounding?

Time on a Stump

The meatgrinder of life had Kev speaking in star patterns and twisting himself up into every single asshole and grilled. Always hot yet or because hurting, Kev's tears were rain for doves. Everywhere Kev turned, there were democratic users of love.

Kidnapped by a buyer/hoarder trick, he stared for a while at the top of a shopping-bag chank: a slice-o-wood clock with its plasticine bark rested on a cardboard ox. Time moved batteried and therefore temporarily unfettered there, on its stump. Bhut whut was to become of us coincidentally, in our later years, sufferers of severe drying?

Kev's Biggest Wanter

Jaula de Espaldas

Kevin Reynolds lay on his back at the bottom of Mike's foreclosed swim poo echoing, sobbing. The sound reminded him of la musica chanquera, the rustic kind that twanged back at your song. It was a form of prairie yelping, wailing known in oldtime saloons. Now his world was cement, a drapery of shunning, much as original ropeswingers saw night as a vanity curtain and privacy overkill. Most of all, there was no Mike: the most un-metaphysical man in the world. This had been a place where they could move in and out of one atmosphere and onto the next and up and back from one surface to the other together. Kev just couldn't help belting out,

"A circle of backs makes a cage;
all the asses seem flat this way;
no matter how much I ballet,
they snatch, trap my gay rage.

"Jaula de espaldas,

albergue de silencio,

aparte de mis amargas

lagrimas, gotas sinceras.

"Zif yor on a big-top lion's den
expressing your nails, glands,
in a trade of begging, demands
with chairs dressed as men.

"Cerrajon de esperanza,
Cojonudo de fortitud,
Menos carne indefensa:
unica arma, boca inmensa.

I'd Like to Hold You Once

Apparently, women really
want to have sex.

But you and I, no
one will suspect.

Let them strut their
glossy trappings

While we steal a
caress and longing.

Brash fruits drop, ho-
llow in our ear;

We mutually suckle
underground.

Would that my
branches could

Find you in air, in-
hibit yor career.


I'm y' baseline, baby!
Kev

Reliquary of K's

Every time his head surfaced, he'd scream at the cameras, "How do I kill it?! How do I kill it!" and it would again twist him under the muddy foam. They were rolling, and the beast's plastic branks had come off in the scuffle. Kevin would have been crying if he had not needed to maintain, to save his life, a fierce persona. The electronic eyes became absurd to him then. He had to squeeze these prehistoric lips together in a lovelock and keep it shut until emergency services could hooptie on over. Publicity may have been his job, but he felt he had already stretched his adventure comfort aperture nearly to snapping.

Meanwhile a family of K's coasted about 250 rods above the desert floor. While they appeared to be a team, each one was searching, lost in its own way. Parents and chillun. Their bodies knew to fly to the left of another's wind, but that was all. Then they heard Kevin Reynolds's horrific squalling.

They turned as one and on a diagonal, calm as death, swooping low enough to take him. There was no question which. As deity, a mother must step forth to challenge the moral capacity of any contrary life form.

The sweat from the back of Kevin's neck began to pool under Peg's tongue.

Clipped in her beak, flanked by her significant others, Kevin wondered if they, now, might eat him, removed from record on a windy chank cliff, solemnly, as if picking through a reliquary.

Bandanna Bandito

There's a restaurant attached to a motel at the edge of town that gives onto a convalescent home across the highway, Chalk Chank Manor. It was shut down for a reason that's mysterious in a town whose most powerful most always get a pass in the press. The Manor is the last real estate that's not pharmland or plain sand from there to Chukka, way beneath the turn of the horizon. The road takes a deep dip also, at the bottom of which there's a mannequin who looks like a bandanna bandito selling junk wood. Kevin has evening meals

there at Finister's, flirting with bologna-face truckers, cement miners and horny carpetbaggers. After a quick dip at the newspaper machine by the door, he'll walk in and spread the Sports N' Alleged Sex Crimes Bugle across the chilly tabletop of the booth with the best view and look out on the dusk. The dead palms at The Manor have radically U-turned, their fronds upside down. The blacktop between is untrammeled enough to be a runway of sorts. Enterers see Finister's and The Manor and Manor Motel as their de facto introduction to the Low Chanks.

Intergenerational Bitch Fight

La-La and M'Lady went at it after a dispute Kevin says over somebody walking by outside the fence. But they were fighting over him. A lot of blood spilled on the patio and up against the stucco. I was trying to wedge apart their muzzles with a plastic lawn chair, Kevin was hosing them down (I said Kevin get the hose as he just stood in stupor), and I was kicking La-La in the ribs since she had her cuspids sunken firmly into M'Lady's upper gingiva. In the guest bath, M'Lady was spurting blood onto the double folding linen closet doors. La-La hid behind a giant white flowering Nerium oleander "La Comodona" where she also goes when I yell. M'Lady looked worse with the facial swelling, but La-La can hardly walk and bleats her whistle-cry with each step. Now I'm wondering should M'Lady be put to sleep. It was she who attacked her own daughter, who was being brushed by the deadbeat daddy. He only there once a week, and La-La growl when M'Lady try an get up in the bed with them. There was even a chunk of fatty tissue on the wet cement and La-La come back before the pain set in and lick it up along with a small puddle of her own mother blood.

It's a mistake to let them work it out between them who's top bitch. Who will cuddle in his bed? Eat from his plate? Sit shotgun in the pickup? Because K. won't step up to the plate and show his strength, put them down, they try murdering for fate.

It Lived

Even the Chukka Chanks Chain rejected
me. They said "yor not Chukka, yor a ba
-stard; you have minerals on your moth-
er's side sure, but that many times rem-
oved? We were going to invite you to C-
hukka Nite. Don't think yor offending u-
s with the Chuk lights in the front wind-
ow. We love our symbol and wish you p-
eace. But saltiness doesn't a stone make.
Fresh goes as earth does and we make i
-t grow. Stone love is stone is and love i-
s stone, Joe. Stone is love, stone is stone

is." They sang this clacking and chipping
at each other. Up Mthyuh way there was
a slab of granite near where I'd pee on c
-amping trips. I thought it literally recoi-
led at splashing urine. Once it seemed to
moisten itself on some moss. I was hon-
ored it would be so real like that in front
of me. It was a granite slab animated, b-
ut not a cartoon. That was before the shi
-v when hallucinations were rare and or
-ganic. What I encountered was rare an-
d inorganic yet able to shapeshift expres
-sively. I won't say poignantly, but it lived.

Joe [the Mp3]

Low Star

Low star, pull your pants up
Low star, slippry and dense
Low star, walk the rooftops
Low star, impervious.

Because Kevin Reynolds experienced the miserable smoking child cardiologist as a deity, he overcompensated its malice with allowances, which were tithes. The meat divinity could slip along the gums of the spa mouth, a critical tongue clucking a roller-coasting ticker tape of praise and affront, while Kevin stood locked and branked in one spot twixt therapeutic jets and offered up a stance which looked relaxed (on a commercial for a 900 number or a mustang ranch).

Low star, a mud bottom
Low star, or a searchlight
Low star, banana trees
Low star, not high season.

Kevin looked like a statue in a grease fountain lamp, with stray dog hair, hanging on a chain. Stitching through conversation and anaesthesia, the skin-masked and sterile stethoscope imp had trapped him in a crib of adoration and scorn. The bars were taut suture wire, twisted like candy canes or stripers on poles, down which the serum ran in dizzying regular spiraling drips. A suffering physician took Kevin Reynolds's needful swell under advisement with the assumed entitlement of a faith healer rigging a magic trick or something you could plug into a cigarette lighter.

Low star, where are you now
Low star, surface drifter
Low star, moth ball in pop
Low star, gravid ardor.

When he awoke afloat in four-hundred-thread-count sheets, the message indicator on the telephone flashed like a red lighthouse beacon. There was pea seed in his hair, and the oracle was still ignited, drumming out that morning’s urgent crisis. There seemed to be no air, just a tobacco-y sealant which even caught the future and held it still. The Other Presence had left this disco-cabana world reemed and vacant as a church. Kevin Reynolds was once again a gentleman alone in society, but his manhood was broken in two.

Low star, you were fragile
Low star, melted cupcake
Low star, bloody s-curve
Low star, meanderer.

Auspicious Battery

Sated but still licking at shivplate from a round, girlish stone after the fact, horizontal poolside in a white rubber chaise, it's easy to call: Fool's Blessing, Chump's Paradise. After a 16-ladder climb up to the corner shade cave, it better be good, and it better be bad. I had to apologize to the valet-wench when the tip of my hard Italian duffel chipped the "bronze" trunk of a sentinel gomphotherium, stuck obnoxiously there in eternal trumpeting siege too near the beads like a high-security hole sniffer. Then appeared the living creatures.

It hadn't been three steps after checking in when I spotted it across the water, between doric plaster columns among a copse of senatorial nudists with towels, hunched over its tray of ashes. The chest was sunken, and the face was drawn of limits that all spelled bitterness and spite. It could have been so posed at a maiden's breast on a canopy bed, having sucked all the life with her breath, yet still wheezing for truth and light and sympathy. Its toenails bit into the cement. It watched me.

Later that night, I stepped out of my room for a jacuzzi. There was something glowing blue at its lip. Some bodies pose naked because they cook with religion, and he was a doctor of carnal gospel. To take the waters and behold him was to sit in bubbles of pornographic faerie children. His blue light and severed heads, caught in their fright and wonderment, dangled from every nipple, hypnotized all moral superiority. His youth and self-regard, krishna art and wicca, made that night the start of my final auspicious shakedown and battery.

Inevitable Blanket of Shunning

Inevitable
blanket of shunning

bunched up in my groin,
I wrote these verses

on an envelope
with a broken dick,

and to repair it
will cost me an inch.

The ban on grafts is
a way to maintain

community de-
stabilization.

We must appear to
be daft: writhing in

pain to a thing you
got immunity.

Kevin Reynolds' Mom

My armpits smell different at this altitude
Like somebody's plans, all musty.
Way down in the valley, they are garlicky,
something living.
While I'm here it may seem I'm older;
It may be the stress of the ropes and
airborne cement. Or,
somehow I've come to lose him and find
him at the same tam.
Oh my Mthyuh, I'm Kevin's mom and I
cayn't fine ma boi.

Shivbar

Hoolie had scared everyone by passing out early so someone found a tab of windowpane in the glove box and slipped it under his Perfek Pink-Brownish tongue. In his oversized tan wool coat and fur leggings he came to like a bird's head popping up from a pool. They gave him a sharp knife and dropped him at the doorstep of a shivbar.

An elderly wiseguy in a Johnny Cash outfit greeted him with good-humored jadedness. There was a combo: two guitarists, a bass with a bow, and a polka master. "Who's that?" Asked the Hoolima. "Gilberto Whoopti-Sanchez and the Whatdaphux," answered the bawdy bouncer. "They're just doing a sound check right now-- should be starting in about seven minutes. I traida tell them: dooyer practicing at home, you know? Ha ha." Wiseguy addressing the ostensibly blind jazz organist on his off night sitting at the bar. "Waincha practice foya get here, y'know? Ha ha. Right Jimmy?"

Everyone loved Hoolie there, or so it seemed. Lovely Linda came right up to him with her throat uncovered; this was before she died. "Look what you've got!" she commented.

"I'd like to drag this lightly across your throat," said he, smiling, while doing so.

Linda was frightened and excited. She loved Hoolie, so she had some crazy faith that she would not die. In fact she didn't. Her subsequent death was unrelated.

She was sensitive enough to know that a tiny curly shrivel of the topmost layer of the skin which lie across her trachea was being shaved away and falling into His Perfek Pink-Brown palm, and that was all. She felt as though she had to trust someone just then.

Suddenly everyone Hoolie knew had ventured out into the rain and instead an impossibly beautiful young couple had taken a seat at the bar. They had shiv stones right in front of them but neither was going to lower their head for the tiniest lick. They were broke, he fantasized. They wanted all the beauty and meaning of this historic place without having to pay the price. But the longer he waited he knew that wasn't it. They only looked at one another, and all the more beautifully when knotted in that gaze. Hoolie asked the waitress, an elegantly aging goth chick, to send them a fresh dose on him, but only if they asked for one first.

Then the second guitarist was looking into his eyes and stroking vigorously to accompany his master. Between sets, the second guitarist stood in many places: near the service area, ordering for himself and taking in the compliments of the barkeep while letting his tawny brown eyes reflect in Hoolie's glass of port. Next to a column roped with Plaster Grapes, perfeckly in alignment with Hoolie's eyes. Standing speaking with the dark-spectacled accordionist while they drank, Peeping Gingerly over his colleague's shoulder into Hoolie's eyes.

In his dream, the second guitarist, a gaunt hungarian type named Kevin Reynolds, came up to Hoolie and whispered, "Darling you are too young to be sending Teary-Eyed Drinks to young lovers in nightclubs. Your true homage should be to those who can respect and appreciate the glory of your Ripened Manhood."

In reality, of course, Hoolie got tired of the suspense and went next door for a Bedtime Sandwich.

But songs began to well up in him.