26.2.23

Two Poems by BCAB

BLOODY WEEK

 

Sorry

whose cops are these?

I’m still in line

to buy you bread.

All these ghosts

that clean the streets—

I barely made it home.

I step in an oilslick

and I have a little hope

that I set it on fire.

At least—

that the shooting resumes

tomorrow AM,

and when I call in sick,

no one is there to answer.
 
 
ACCOUNT
 

Added up,

I’ll try to afford the future.

But I’ve got debts:

starting with a day long ago

when the planes streaked over.

They were blue angels—

from my father’s shoulders I watched

as they made everything blue:

the sky,

his windblown ski jacket,

the little ocean of stars in the flag’s corner.

I was a burning pinhole on the angel’s wing,

a blur of stripes that passed

with a shock and a roar.

That’s the first debit.

Others followed.

The day I first drove, and spun like a wheel on hot pavement.

Sometime later I hummed like a freshly tuned string.

And a million others—

The statement delivered as a thousand streaks of red.

And then I lost more time

in trying

to pay it all back:

to catch the string, stop the wheel, let the star pass,

and live like a quiet, buried stone.

From underground, I conclude that the future is red.

Because later, older,

everything is red.

Accounts, overdrawn—

the cheap cloth I wear

that comes from far away.

The leaves (thank god) coming down a little late

or the soil around me.

This doesn’t solve the puzzle or balance the accounts

but the red is just there; saying:

this way to the light on the exit sign—

past the balance sheet of jubilee,

the ink-dried stamps on voided checks,

the ruddy fuel mix now fed to the rocket’s injector:

through the door, here is the blood of a martyr.

But let’s keep it simple:

If I had a budget, I’d put most of it towards red sand,

the part of me linking ground to sky,

the iron rich deltas of American excess

that I give you permission to pulverize

so long as you do it together.

If we don’t live to see it,

let it remind them of dust on Mars,

the very same that will greet them

at the lander’s door

with the placid silence

of a world without credit.



15.2.23

Three Poems by Joseph Goosey

No Time To Party

        
         Time to choke
         on the waning aftermath.  

The guidelines state
                “I” must
                      mean “we”

                      if I’m to be considered 
                      worthy by the arbiters
                      of working class tragedy.  
                     
                      Holler if you hear 
                      the directions out.

                                 Fuck yr guidelines
                                
                                 & the natural order taboot!

How loathed those jams!

             Interminable as a death
                                   in which I was expected
                                   to dance.
    
                                  Could’ve been sadder.
                                 
                                  Could’ve married an Italian
                                                       who demands
                
                                   SUNDAY FAMILY TIME

Week after
week after week
after week after -

                            WHO’S THERE?

                                      What an ultimate dunce
                                      I’ve been since the start
                                      to ever even think
                                      options lived here anymore.



The Liquor Store Maidens Know Me Like A Cancer


The liquor store maidens know me like a cancer.

           Somewhere,
           one’s place is cemented.
     
                        Beneath Colorado mulch, maybe,
                                                    where it’s legal
                                                     to be at peace.

                                                    What I’ve said?
                                         Yet to be seen.

                                            Laughing all the way
                                             to the plasma bank!

                               Spent the preferred
          portion of a night
             praying to a god
             who’s no longer
         reading unsolicited
            sacrifice. In total
                                      
                                      I’m one bled doggy!

Under the magnifying heart – a carcass.

                                  Smolder me once.
                                    
            Catholic shame on me.
                                       
                       Murder me twice.
                                        
 Magnfuckingifique.



Pith Trap

        
         A pride parade
of tragic figures
            
              from Smeagol to DMX
            
     has had it worse
                 & better
          but it’s tough  
     goings & circumstances
                 got me cowered
in the uniform closet
             where we used to make out
          on the fascistic clock.

$25 a pop.

      I pop.

Instant regret
             floods the mausoleum. 
 
 
 

5.2.23

Four Poems by Mark Young

The hills are alive with the sound of potluck

 

There is no room, but elephants graze

there, flapping their wings until the

 

lake boils over & the Reverend Charles

Dodgson is forced to come & rescue

 

them. That's the problem with summer

in the high country — little or no pre-

 

cipitation, so dry that residents live on

the edge of madness most of the time,

 

unsure if the char-à-bancs will come or if

the lobsters will be home in time for tea.

 

 

Parsing Self-Evidence

 

The fundamental aim in the linguistic analysis of a language L

is to separate the grammatical sequences which are the sentences

of L from the ungrammatical sequences which are not sentences of L.

—        Noam Chomsky: Syntactic Structures.

 

There is such a thing as the self: the no-

self theory is not about the self at all —

both statements do not need any proof

or explanation, but together they are

somewhat contradictory. "Life, Liberty

& the pursuit of Hippyness" is fine

unless you're a Cretan, because then

you have Epimenides doing a polka

 

with Thomas Jefferson in polka dots.

But Epimenides was a Cretan & T.

Jefferson owned about 600 slaves in

his lifetime, so self-evidence here turns

into nothing but verbosity, purely subject-

ive, & definitely objectionable overall.

 

 

A political pamphlet written by the Irish

 

A vividly-detailed pirate skull

patch trapped behind the desk

 

informs me that my ham will

last the distance. Meanwhile I

 

devour an order of fries with

cheese like a post hibernation

 

bear. I'm still trying to decide if

my food fetish is part of a sister

 

trope to melodrama or caused

by a lobster being heterozygous.

 

Potatoes don't help. The Green

Mediterranean diet just might.

 

 

The Night of The Jackal

 

As lost insecticides embrace

the planet & sun-colored

 

cortèges burrow into the desert,

Anubis, funeral director &

 

puppeteer extraordinaire,

alights from his e-chariot,

 

bumps fists with the delighted

crowd of his myriad madding

 

admirers, & lights the gas jets of

the only crematorium in town.