Retrograde echo: Monster Poinsettia

In this forest we give fear, alms to the Begging
Rajah, who straddles a red-eyed dog named
Shab. M' lord, your palms once carried, gave
Vajras as gifts, cupped milk curd and batteries.
Once, riding home to the Moist Pinkish Cave
From a tour of generosities, which were your
Fetish, you came upon a poinsettia as high as
The Fordamal Chank, at Chukka. Its star-shape
Mouths bobbed in thickets of plaited wondry;
It's hunger smelt rough and good and buttry;
But as your fingers slid thru the crinkled folds
In bliss, there was a neuro-chemical stab,
Your eyes rolled, and the Monster Poinsettia's
Incisors chopped your hands off at the wrists.

can't feel pleasure

can't tell this lush diamond pave from the glory or pain of blood and treasure
don't see eye to eye with peacock feathers, shade or nudity, healing waters
shant feel pleasure, won't embrace the never happens part of our tomorrow

mangaboyhagcapm

pie and wooden box

50-year-old Dildo

Sometimes when cherished guests have been to stay
and I'm lounging in around-the-house apparel
it feels as if they never went away

bird twisted like a fish into an 8
wild dog's high call
two-dimensional representation
balls of the hillside coyote

kill the night? or leave it to night mongers
irresponsible domestic predators
are not allowed to perimeter guard or roam
after dark or when we're not home.

Donna

List for John in The Fifth

we thought we'd invented 69
he was white and i was black
one of us hated, the other loved
we were in bed

i good, he so bad
him cunning me linguistics
Each of us say over and out
bleach and trade underwear

as in passing fire buckets, tandem
to achieve a common goal: heroism
but turned in opposite directions
stomped along streets out of step

late and later to finish eating/ exit car
once i read while he wrote a letter
fair is everything not real
fortune arrives if you look away

i stretched, he hung from a bar
rosebud, green pine cone
dozens of eggs spinning
his knees wrapped in my elbows


Reptily

Last rabid dog in England

you can only hear
how water rubs air
stones click together

trust a moonless wood
to take your sloughing  
ruin in its brook

crickets' constant ring
feeds between the ears
sanding smooth the nerve

breath of tar and loam
this evening sinking
below the earth's turn

anywhere or to anyone

I don't belong anywhere or to anyone
My life has been a zig-zag up these
invisible stairs, cartwheels on air.

To me most of all it's clear we're alone
each in a maze with the tunnels sized
down to our own labyrinth choices.

When you toy with your hair, it's like
what God says: do not trace roots to me,
for I've always been a self-unto unity.

Ken

Fruit Bowl

actors seem false

On the information highway,
my husband doesn’t know how to drive
“with the flow of traffic.”

always the asso flying past
or freaking out, boxed into a hive
swarming slowly past him

when it gets like a wet racetrack
living longer’s not a top concern
but panic turns to calm

I asked him once, Jim, I asked him
Have you ever caused someone to skid.
Yes but with shame, he said.


Jan
"My Husband is Wayne"

Another Amsterdam or Another Venice?

As the butt of everything,
do you dyke in or build up
when churning natures call?
As the mons warms, his
eyes they skitter and sweep,
want to feel her everywhere;
Is she in the palm of an outsider?


Baal

De Zonia

Dosia N. Conner

Community Butt

I was a tall, skinny hustler with rings of abs and ribs
holding up a light armor pecs and deltoid silhouette.
I appeared around the same time hippies turned to drink.
My face looks like I got punched in the face, which I did.
Then I pulled a love handle.

Mike was a physical therapist who came into my life when
dawn was darkening the focus of every day,
and when I couldn't catch a ride in the city canyons from
one to another 3rd floor reflector curtain hotel,
he helped me pogo to the next level.

You grasp at stuff when it's too late, literally smoke;
as community butt, you have to set it aflame.
Fast lane living is about always looking out frontally
and maybe registering peripherally a bum hitching,
later as afterimage or sunspot, and then a funnel.


Love,
Hoolie

what an idiot

this weekend can't mean anything,
and not for lack of trying;
we're in a story's long stretch now.

this dread torques countenance
through your ancestors, correspondents;
the world's an idiot to your purpose here.

Static Parade

cott'ny balloons resting,
blobs splattered into frozen
place by a blowtube

billowed as if popped,
their shadows tattoos,
spread on a membrane

wanting humility

Sunflower heads, popping their stashes,
want to bend away and face the ground.

The earth itself likes to turn in its grave.
Diers of thirst circling are well drill bits.

In fire, grains of years curl remorsefully,
and only glowing caps of dust can relax.

gimme the dee effin money

gimme the dee effin money,
an eagle with wings that are a map:
these are the things that seem a
good idea to me.

a spaceship secured by
gravity and chains
where they chop down trees,
jubilant dirge of victory.

sorrowful tomahawk,
legs of ginger
stomping through tall grass,
tuneful recorders, fingers.

Hoolie
"desesperado"

Terror v. Horror v. Anxiety v. Fear v. Panic v. Paranoia v. Puzzlement v. Exasperation v. Dread

Headlights made me squat and lie down on my back like a cat burglar. Those and other slick gangster moves made me wonder who am I?

I'd stand before the oracle dispenser and a great personality, an exaggeration, appeared to bubble into the frame, a swelling from my skull.

Was it self-regard made me lose a way to muscle outta here? I wake up exhausted from a night of paramilit'ry operations: for bread.

Reptily

Prop

the painting looks like a prop,
or it is a prop, or
the boy is a prop,
or he looks like a prop, or
the painter saw him or used
him as a prop, or
the painting was a prop for a large
and pretentious receiving hall or
middle-class cascade of staircase, or
set as a prop in a film or on tape.

it could also have been an ad,
or a mockup for an ad, maybe a
generic boy for any number of ads, with
no copy, or a painting of an ad for
anything, a bill board could have pro-
vided to the painter a free model of 1 the human figure,
2 how you can produce commercial art, and
3, that if you are a boy, this look would be OK.
this painting could have been the result of a grandmother and
some ads she'd seen and wanted that look for this boy.