I’m cheating a little this week—in my desire to keep my weekly publishing streak going (see last week’s post for a more intentional product of this) today I’m cross-posting some recent poems from my poetry Substack, Document City.
The best description I can give for the genre is “surrealist post-topian science-fiction verse”—read the intro post if you want a full sense of the strange premise my oddball mind is capable of concocting.
Don’t try to make sense of it, just let it be, and hopefully get a little laugh or something to ponder out of it. And subscribe if you’re curious for more.
A Guidebook To The Unknown
Sweetheart! There’s no time (no time to (no time) (to to to)) so let’s! go! Yessiree, story time!
we’ll have a drive
drive a drive
see the sign
see the the the
Look babe: Monster 1: ¿kay es estoh, como talle vooh? (crack your back crack my back let’s start again.) Flying daggers shave men too tall to shave themselves, their heads crowning through the cloud cover. This is Monster 1: the gutter where the daggers fall, their motion stilled but giving glow to the empty streets. A blimp will rise today, fed on this fuel, and it will burn a sweet magenta as the Real World slowly dies away.
Monster 2! Your great grace as you hurt me, smiling through 18 pair of teeth, troubled not by what happens on the telly but solely. dedicated. to. my. doom. and for that I snack on chips and sing a swinging ditty, my air an inverted image of the image I once was. I’ve got 2,000 trial verdicts and a hard-on but ain’t ain’t ain’t no going back now.
Monster. 3. Firehouses! A phonograph needle lodged in your! A mind that makes a mind that makes a mind! Listless Jon-Don Smith: “The road, my friends, is road”! Tie-die and nationalism! And you pull back your arm and I pull back mine and! god we’re bleeding
monster 4 monster 4
trapezoid pumpcake underbelly gasstation
lexichristian cinnamon sourceking cawl
freezeframe ballyhoo wing’tbird singstride
earnest earnest boy earnest earnest earnest
Ok now take your hand and ok now put it right there
(no knowns know whether what’s known is unknown)
Saturday! Great munching farce of a fuck
Should the anger seep into the waterways, towns and towns will die
(hark those herald angels singe)
But “Smile!” (don’t smile) “Smile!” (don’t smile) “Smile!”
and if ever anybody was everybody, it was you.
Coward
Hello Muck. ‘Tis Delicious. Glad you found Satisfaction Street. Poorly marked the maps these days. Been thinking about wartime in the Age of the Anvil, all those castle bastards fathered in the ride-in-ride-out of the janissaries from the Renaissance Faire.
I saw one of them polishing a dixie nickel and humming the score of Cats
while snakes dripped from the refrigerators (the plight of a refugee in the 222nd century!)
A boredom descended like an aria of Callas—the remaining Cervantes burst into flame.
Friday: A screaming decline. Two hours. Joy ride. Marvelous. Muck, dear Muck,
I’d like to report that with the proceeds of the penny pond we now have enough
to buy a king-sized Snicker, or a small croissant.
Noh Alone
I am a knife-borne babe. Set in my course
I'm called to slaughter the kings and their paramours
the criminal hordes that crowd the voting booths
and 50,000 fly fishers named Jim.
Shuriken tucked away in folds of my flesh
America's Christmas kiddo. "Say sonny,"
says newscaster Cronkite, "Hey sonny."
Magazines print his picture with a picture of mine.
Noh blows it tho. Everything's fucked.
He sends me the fire emoji. He sends me the shit emoji.
I double down and end my life with a barbell.
All at once every tree combusts.
When the color returned to the sky,
Noh woke from a nap and thanked the heavens.
He took his niece down to the place with the wolves
where they fed the wolves, and stayed happy.
March was much warmer than usual that year.