vivienne westwood, portal, fatty tissues

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Yaffa blocks. Sunburst clocks. Sunbury Lock. Dame Vivienne Westwood. Dame Judith Olivia Dench. Twelfth Night. She's the Man. She's All That. Lori Beth Denberg fatty tissues anorexia. A&E's Intervention. TLC's What Not to Wear. "That camisole is really frightening." "Goodbye shoulder pads." Varsity locker room circle jerk fantasy football ad campaign. The mall at Christmastime. Gifts for the dogs. Book drive for the disadvantaged ESL immigrant children. "Edible Arrangements." Cantaloupe and honeydew always last to go on the fruit platter. Likewise green pepper and cherry tomatoes on the vegetable platter. Paul Newman. Robert Redford. Ralph Lauren aviator shades argyle worsted wool blazer. Reindeer print sweater vest. Comet. Cupid. Chakra. Churro. Fatty tissues. Those portals in chimneyless houses through which Santa squeezes. Walmart blue. Home Depot orange. H & R Block green. Pink. A little extra emphasis at the bust area. Don't miss a compelling new episode of American Chopper. Happy birthday, Jesus. Fairwell, fair cruelty.
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nightmare, drizzling, suckerfish

Joshua died in a drownin accident last summer. Claire won’t say a word about it one way or another. I walked fast from school today, but they caught up with me, the Werner twins, blowin spitballs in my hair like a coupla idiot suckerfish. What a nightmare! One came runnin, spinnin her backpack. It caught me in the stomach, and oh--I could not breathe! But I kept on walkin down that hill, past our neighbor, Mr. Joe, sittin upright, diggin for weeds, I reckon. The hose was on. And beside him was Harris, our dog, rollin in the dirt with his legs in the air! Two weeks ago, when Harris got off his chain, he started attackin people. Especially the preacher when he came out to mow. Dog-won’t-come-near-me. He just sits in the yard and stares past our elm tree. And wanders. One night, Claire got up from bed because she heard a noise outside our window. Then she found this fur pile and an eye, drizzled with white splinters that looked like teeth! Supposedly, it was still alive. But she won’t say anything, since that scream that woke up grandma. No one had much to say at breakfast. The thing is, my cousin Joshua is the only person that’ll talk to me anymore! His eyes follow me when I walk past his picture in the hall. He lies next to me sometimes, too, all wet and cold smelling like moss. He’s the one who says I should kick those twins right in the mouth after I drop my lunch money on the ground. Joshua promises he’s not a tattler, but thanks to him, grandma thinks I still wet the bed.
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waffle, awful, tunafish

love handles with care those untidy

exchanges we must have with each

other when naked & wanting to be

vulnerable: like making eye contact

with that wily Other as we fastidiously

fill each square in the waffle below us

with syrup so that each bite interrupts

the raw, embarrassing happiness, we’re

jonesing on, with its calculated sweetnesses.

with Belgian waffles so good & love so bad

i do not see how anyone ever…

we can’t stay together breakfasting like

so. we’ll get fat love handles with…o no

nevermind there being only a green chance

of dodging the awful boneyard party sex

awaiting us all till the screams of grandma

and grandpa slap at our ears from the

awful greeting cards as we try desperately

to relish our tunafish lunches; goddamn it!

there should be legislation to keep these

poor, sorrowful fuckfaces from themselves.

why do not they all go start a family already?

they do not even need to fuck. why, they can

all just go by age and decide who will be who

for a long or short while depending on their

fortunes until they all die of natural causes as

the last rehearsed smile comes easy on them

from the face of a well paid hospice nurse who

knows it wasn’t a moment too soon for me.

lest i roam the streets: my teeth grinding softly

like cat turds rolling in a litter box. beseeching

strangers to undo the knot of my back, i’m a pathetic

mendicant with a deathwish & an old knife that leads

nowhere except to an operating table where a scalpel

tries to race the heart failure that beat me to myself as

i tell myself how much it’ll irk me to be surgically gutted.

it is all the waffle’s fault; the syrup too…

Sunday, snowflake, tacklebox

I followed the line on the hook lodged in Danny’s neck back to BK’s reel.

I gripped the sides of the three-man Prowler boat, bobbing up and down in time to the miniature waves of the lake. No one said a word for a few very heavy with child heartbeats.

The pristine day betrayed the situation; The billowing, puffy clouds overhead, the slow motion explosion of nature on the far shores, the click/whirr of the cicadas, the gentle lapping of the waves on the bottom of the Prowler all exuded a lazy tranquility of a mid-afternoon Sunday in June.

The night before we had danced on tables to the Blues Explosion and BK had suggested we go fishing to ease away the hangover before the three of us returned to work at the sculpture foundry on Monday, where Danny could weld the eyelashes on a snowflake and BK could balance a 750 lb statue on an ice-skate blade. I just made molds.

“Oh man, I am sorry…” BK said as he tried to stifle a laugh.

“Watch where you’re casting, you dumbass” Danny shouted back, looking straight ahead, afraid to turn his neck.


“Get the needle nose pliers out of the Tackle-box and get this goddamn fuckin’ hook out of my neck” Danny barked.

The tackle-box was at my feet and I opened it up, digging through lures, sinkers, bobbers, a rusty box of band aids. I found the pliers under a ticket stub for a 1998 Detroit Tigers baseball game against the Chicago White Sox. I handed them to BK and sat on my hands.

He grabbed the end of the hook with the pliers.

“Ok Dan, I am going to count to three”

“One…”
“Two…”

diplomat, hovercraft, textbook

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It was an open and shut case. Textbook stuff for Detective Matthew Blatt; he solved the case without even leaving his desk. The Japanese diplomat – some sort of attaché to the ambassador – had been killed out in the swamps. Hell knows what he was doing out there anyway, but he’d been hit by a hovercraft driven by a gator trapper and was pronounced dead at the scene.

But that wasn’t it though, or else this day might’ve been a bit short and boring.

Blatt was given the responsibility of calling the deceased’s next-of-kin. Expecting to be given the name of some poor Jap lady over in Tokyo or something, Blatt was a little surprised to be handed a card with ‘Adolfo Aranjuez’ written on it, and a local telephone number. He checked with Shirley, but it wasn’t a mistake. He called.

“Heylo, this is the Pleasure Palace. Mister Happy-Pants speaking.”

Blatt hesitated, a little flustered. “Um, hey, hello. I’m looking for an Adolofo Aranjuez?”

He knew he’d called the right number when the voice on the other end of the line dropped two octaves.

“Speaking. How can I help you…”

“Hi Mr Aranjuez. This is Detective Blatt from the Los Angeles Police Department. Are you sitting down? I’m afraid-“

“OH NOOOO. NOT HIM! NOT NOW! NOT MY TWINKLE BUNNY!”

Blatt was surprised, to say the least. “I’m not sure what you are saying, Mr Aranjuez, but I’m calling to inform-“

The usual conversation ensued, albeit with a surreal bent. Blatt found himself getting more and more curious about the entire situation.

“Mr Aranjuez, I know you’re upset, but is there any chance you can come in to answer some questions? We are still trying to wrangle why the Japanese diplomat was out in the swamp…”

“His name was Hitoshi Ito, Mr Police Man. And even though you won’t believe me in a million trillon years, I’ll tell you why my Twinkle Bunny was knee-deep in those backwaters. Maybe it’s time for you to take a seat.”
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camera, mach, eyelashes

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Documenting a kangaroo hunt. Sounds stupid, no matter which way you describe it. Yet Douglas had sold the idea to his editor, had shoveled that shit with practiced claptrap, twaddle and tripe, that he had even convinced himself that the premise was sound. Idiot. Nay, strike that. A Fucking Idiot.

Now here he is, crouched low and unsteady in the tray of a 1978 Holden ute, one hand viced onto the side of the cab, the other holding his too-expensive too-complicated Nikon camera in the nook of his arm. A dog, Mulray, lies opposite him on a pile of ocky-straps, a portrait of serenity. Fucking cheek, to be that calm really, even if you are a stupid canine. Feels like they’re traveling at Mach bloody 3, and not just on a flat bitumen road or anything, but over dirty red hillocks and dead spikes of bush. Like being on a speedboat in choppy conditions, except if you fly out of this machine you’re not landing in water. Douglas feels a pang for Sydney – the seabreezes, the 6pm cocktail hour, the civilisation.

The driver of the ute and Douglas’ escort for this morbid and immoral project is a fella named Cunt. That’s how he introduced himself: “Howdy, the name’s Cunt” and that’s what his wife had called him: “Oi, don’t you go anywhere Cunt without leavin’ me and the little shits some money.”

Douglas tries to compose himself and looks over the top of the cab to where they are headed. The whole setting is quite beautiful, really, with the sun setting and a grey-blue sky that is bigger than big. Sure, his eyelashes are brittle with red dust and he is about to shit himself, but things could get worse.
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bold, drowning, black

David Lemon gently drove his Volkswagen round the misty Ranges in search of a Christmas tree. An hour prior to this his wife, Melanie, had boldly confessed to having an affair two years ago, while he was in Afghanistan. The sudden change in emotional state had made Lemon feel nauseous and, desperate not to bear witness to any more tragedy, Lemon told his wife not to worry, that he would be back soon with a tree.

Melanie moved to the bathroom where she refused to cry. She washed her hair and it fell around her shoulders in black eel curls. Drowning in disgrace, Melanie looked to the yellow scum ring that had formed around the inside of the tub. She attempted to read her fortune inside it. The future looked murky, except for one area near her thigh where there appeared to be a perfectly crafted horse.

Taking the long turn before Riversdale, Lemon watched carefully as pine trees flicked by. Reasoning with himself was proving to be difficult when, suddenly, a horse came thundering down the mountain and into his Volkswagen. On collision the horses’ stringy, black legs flew up into the sky, and, treading helplessly through the air, the animal gave a short, musical wail before falling in a heap atop his vehicle.

Startled and concussed, Lemon crawled from the warmth of his Volkswagen and out onto the road. The cars side-view mirror was bent up and reflecting the sky. Lemon held his breath, then touched the horses mane. It was dripping wet, as if the animal had just been swimming. That's strange, thought Lemon.

Looking down the empty road, he knew it would be many hours, if not days, before anyone came by, and so it was here that Lemon decided to leave the horse behind.

home, lines, sympathy

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I walked into a party. An Upper West Side party. With fresh art on the walls, people stood around watering themselves with various stemmed or blunt glass in hand, champagne, red wine, black dresses, the occasional red, the occasional fru fru cocktails, fishnets, dominatrix heels, some smoking. There was a sushi chef by a bonsai display. I felt sorry for him, but I’m sure he was getting a nice dime for his Samurai skills. Dimly lit in the center of the floor was a stage with a three piece band. A guy with fiery red unbrushed looking hair and oversized plastic sunglasses stood at a keyboard, while a black man in silver dress shoes blew into an oboe. An albino goddess tinked on a xylophone. White hair down and long to her perfect bubble. They were playing Unchained Melody. I looked up, through the glass ceiling of the penthouse suite. No stars as usual. The matte soot gray clouds were neither still nor without the occasional jet twinkling by--perforating a line to JFK. I closed my eyes. Opened them, and caught a stiff brown something walking by, on a tray and swallowed it. In my periphery a glimpse of an angel sauntered by like a feline. From body to body touching faces, feeling fabrics on lapels, her face masked, feathered, elaborate, she was a living breathing question of beauty and mortality. I would die, I thought. Very painfully, just to touch her right now. I looked at my watch. 9:30, and this place was already packed. Then, a hand touched my back. A whisper: Welcome home, baby. How was your trip? I was still holding my suitcase. It was my fault. I knew she hated being alone. I got you something, I said. Something rare. And expensive.

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fist, condom, Halloween

a bomb tore up some palatial whorehouse that'd forgotten October around the time the sluts all tried to get sober; they got their wish in a flash of shrapnel the size of a fist that blew a few pairs of jiggly, purple lips off leaving the messy cerise circles to trickle their shrieks into each other as the piano player’s right hand got off half a crescendo before crunching clean through the soundboard while his twitching foot was left to pedal the ghost operated piano now oddly prepared with bones, and bits of teeth that might have made music to keep the hemorrhaging hookers dancing if only the piano man was still a man & not a piano that could do no good a week later for their feet that sad Halloween after hours of trick or treating with their bastard children who donned cardboard boxes & made jokes all night about how real mommy’s scars looked that night as they walked to one more 20 room house where another happy family doling out candy asked them what she was supposed to be with most curious countenances locked for an answer that never came out because mom stood there as the tears turned everybody around like the keys women keep in their purses right next to the just in case condom that never does end up getting used as much as the couple of razorblades the prostitutes will glean later from those abba zabba bars with their pointy incisors as the johns waiting in the lobby help themselves to the chintzy glass bowl full of stale candy corn sitting next to the fat, tidy heaps of cocaine waiting patiently for the trollops to chew through their dollops of tough candy so they can be lined up for the higher dollar cocks.

Floriade, doggy paddle, birthday

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We Were Explorers -- 3 Poems

We doggy paddled

to the center

of the deepest creek.

We waded

with the bullfrogs

gone silent.

She was the hottest

monument,

Esmerelda, expanded

to species, adapting

in the solitude

of an extreme desert,

we sifted through to test

our wingspans

overlooking lights

in the distance,

Floriade wreaths

of sparkling

year round.

On her birthday

I said ten places,

I would put my lips to

the count of ten--

I pledged to play

with the pulse,

her breathing,

to seep sounds,

some light

between our lips,

forearms

sliding past ears,

slick heat, impervious

to the dry-wind bellowing

on our backs

with seeds and sweat,

while throats

expanded on wet

stones escaping

formaldehyde

smells, chalk, dust...

settling into silt.

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