NOW FOR THE PUNCHLINE

"everybody
dies"

CRUEL SACRAMENT

first blood on
fallen shards of
moon just because
you're young and
must suck the clit
eventually like
scabs wishing on
a scar that is so
perfect years later
even her fingers are
going to remember

Poetic Justice

drinking pulque through
a torn hoary
mask would

look funny in an obsidian
mirror but the
20th Century Fox

died of AIDS years ago
so our dance is over
and I'll just

warm these tortillas
on the manifold
of my disappearing

Pontiac near the
last exit
to Xochimilco

where Sal Paradise
once spit out bennies
like broken teeth

Let Me Down Real Slow

on the palm-lined
street of a PlayStation 2
game your pastel
bungalow blares forth the
telling screams of
virtual unreality when
her stomach bile
green eyes tell you that
she's lying again

GHETTO TERRARIUMS



who gives a fuck


and who doesn't

PHILIP WHALEN MEMORIAL .357

I live here for 24 years
fighting and fucking Indians
and some cocksucker from
Calif. turns me in for an
outhouse and not having a
proper septic and I get the
letter from Klamath county
explaining what I got to do
or my family hits those red
cinders so I send out the
proverbial poor me begging
letter and my one saint
patron comes through as
always but the famous-archive-
25-medical-patent-holding-
motherfucking doctor in
Miami who has my poems
under glass sends only $50
even though the book I sent
with the request was $10 and
that's cool it's beer money
but now what's beautiful is I
also apply to Poets In Need
there in Berkeley run by poets
who wouldn't piss on me if it
made me smell better and they
send over a $2,000 grant in the
name of the great Philip W. and
with that and what the saint
sent I pay back taxes get my
permits and the test holes dug
to hold them off a little longer
and all the change goes to buying
this soothing 2" snubbie pistol
a poor man's insurance policy
because I'm still lacking the
other $8,000 the system will
cost and now it's all up to a USDA
rural development section 504
loan or face that street where
the shit always runs downhill

beer warm beer a warm beer at six

six in the morning the morning
after the balls those balls

slap ass her ass means it's monday

monday again and
the hangover another

hangover has yet

to kick in kick in in

Ascension

Jesus Christ wasn't
Jesus Christ until
he became John
Coltrane.

WHITE HOUSE DOG

1.

genitals
as a marker

2.

faith in
loaded guns

In Search Of A Definition

"In a real dark
night of the soul,"
observed F. Scott
Fitzgerald, "it is
always three o'clock
in the morning."

Language Arts

All smiles behind
the duct tape.

Looter Eye Shadow

Shot with a price
tag gun because
she plundered time.