The Brooklyn Rail

On the Doomsday Rag

Tomato is foreboding when
it’s cut in two.

Thinking about knives
and guns
cold metal blooming warm,
silver charmed teeth falling loose.

Keep it, Chuck.

Mirrored self
a wizard, crouched and stabbing
another like an oracle card.

Pull   another out of the deck.

A grief of mass bodies,
another,
and the chickens look for the worms

while a vine creeps, curled under the heat.

A cowboy at the end of the world needs an indian

A cowboy at the end of world isn't lonely
He's prepared all his life for the desert to keep him

He's there, at the edge of a mesa,
looking down at the brown expanse
and he wonders about his brown man—
has he melted into the red clay,
will I find his bones, only      his bones,
and wear them
as a keepsake?

And when the decayed  indian’s skin
becomes the desert—when the coyotes eat
what's left of him—his nose will point up,
toward the sun.

The cowboy needs an indian
like the indian needs the land.

It’s like Poltergeist,
it's like Pet Sematary.

At the end of the world,
the cowboy whoops and he hollers—

At the end of the world,
the indian is remembering the pine-clean scent of his church.

Silence is a Binary Code

We’re eating petroleum at the dinner table
but this is not an oil poem

She’s lighting uranium candles
and  We’re performing dead-link seances

The cyber mystic hacks up a hairball of frayed charging cords

and she’s got a conductor pig
right next to her
who’s oinking in broken hard drives

The pig is calling abortions “abobos”
And I don’t know how to feel about it
So I try to tune him out and focus on
the cyber mystic’s seizures.

I’m watching her belly turn into five little bugs
A glitch, a rinky dink home,

and she’s pointing at me

 and the pig goes towards her

and now

Under the floorboards of her belly home
We’re going somewhere—

God’s Plan

I think it's funny when my bush is exposed
 in the public restroom.
Everyone shows the toilet their crotch, gathered in
a porcelain urine offering.
Throne altared.

In those moments of genital commune
I think of love as a bus,
a ritual before the party.
Prayer to relieve prayer.

And I think that the man who gave his sick wife meth
just had so much love to give her!

Death Parde God Hell (sic) on the walls.

He busted her out of the nursing home,
so she could die how she wanted to:
tweaked out lovers      listening to their favorite song.

La, la, la.

He wrapped her in a blanket when she passed,
like the bible told him to.

He cleaned himself with soap and bleach
and that's more of a baptism than I ever had;
if pigs asked me I'd say,

at least she died how she wanted to.