Caterpillar

Ink is raining again.

Stan, on the radio, rapping tattoos
onto white-trash girls,
sitting, spinning on bar stools.

The highway is moving ninety miles
back, to late August madness,
cars are splashing

into phone booths
left over from big cities
and light houses.

But ships don’t come in
like they used to.
The calm of the sea

isn’t the color of God’s
angry finger anymore.

Caterpillar!!

Across the back of my shoulder!
“To rob.” “To pillage.”
“To suck the ink out of every living thing.”

My name is not what matters.
The alphabet is random.
My fingers have no pattern.

I’m bound to and wrapped around each syllable
like a piece of cabbage.
An appetizer. A long, soft caterpillar
eating my way into you.

On The Swallow’s Tail

Wide antic eyes, Salvador, you are your brother
dead, but better. Do you rest on his grave and
tell him about 17th century moustache and
Gala, everything he misses out on.
No need, he sweeps your bones when
they need to grow.
He plants ideas and colors in Spain
where people steal your dreams.

I will give you hopeful fruit
that can be nailed to a wall,
make it my four walls please – a trapezoid leaning in
like egg yolk – protein for my absent
skill. If I had yours,
if only,
I would be she, your catastrophe theory,
feeding you death on a spoon.
I could be your nervous system, taking your wishes
from your guts.
We are not “in fact or intention”
We are surrealism
and I know this because I live inside you,
inside your brother.

Requiem

Lindsey, in perfect fifths,
let’s shatter the veil
between worlds.

The universe is sold out,
but your bridge is precise
and the dead watch your maple
neckline

while I anesthetize myself
in words.

Your snakewood grows on dried gut,
I am glued to paper –

We are limited in time;
in stranded worlds.
Let’s shatter the veil
and bring them together.

Seas Of Insanity pt 1

Faintly nights
sail me out to bad seas

where phantom mermaids
sprout silver razor fangs,

the evil legion
of
uncertainty.

They breed for war company,
not companionship.

My body floats through a
blurry
night vision,

disarranged,

my color changes to corrupt
as
salty thin waves shift
to fit
a temporal sea.

These are MY waters!
Taken by vicious fish women
who
slant
unstable nets
to the West way I wander in

my abducted waters arrest me
in mesh tangles and drag me
down,
down deep,
to the bottom of the bad sea.

It is here where I find them,
or they find me,

sick ghostly’s with their guns
and their sabres,
with their sick hats and masks.

I find them in mirrors, metal trays,
window glass, silver spoons,
lurking as gauzy shadows

at the bottom of the mad
seas,
bad seas,

They are women,
stringers
and
scribblers,

jumping from balconies,
blasting out their brains,
taking madness away from themselves and
handing it back to me,

in fins
and ferocious teeth that finally drag me
away from the mad, bad seas

away from uncertainty,
from faintly nights

to meet
the first blush of the sky
over seas of insanity.

Deprecating Tongues

wicked strikes
on
language
reaching
over seas
across
time difference
plaguing
mental disease
on
populations, tribes,
nationalities

breathe in polluted
words
breathe out
anxious
injurious
leftovers

bipolar whispers
grumbling fault finders
sniveling rascals
serial hope killers
poisoning
airways
stench upon
putrid vocabulary stench

virtually
grasping hands around
necks
and squeezing spirits
away.

Question For You Amazing Fans & Readers……

A wonderful reader and fellow writer sent me this tonight:

“Mags… I’m working on a short based on the lack of use of “By Jove.” I need input…. may i use you and your readers?

I’ve classically reviled the expression of “damning” someone.

Hell is implied. You really don’t need to say, “I damn you to hell!” There’s really nowhere else you’d ever damn someone too…

“I damn you to your bedroom without dinner?” Great parenting!

It’s just not said.

“Horrible dance. The patrons hate you. Damn you to the upstairs rooms to perform private dances AND EARN!”

Not said.

But what if we turned it around? I’m guessing the accepted opposite of “Damning” someone is “Acceptance.” No? I’m not a religious man and am searching for a better word to make this work. Any writers out there? I need help with this thought.

and we publish as a team.”

What about “elevate”, my friend??  “to lift up” …I figure if damning is sending someone “down”, you could also go along with a “religious” theme and use “glorify” or “praise”?? What do you think??