hangin out with a cinderblock and a leaf

i got leftovers
in my ghetto-80s
soviet luggage
and some socks,
and this tough-actin
bomber jacket with
sable trim,
and a ghost rider comic
from 1995,
vol. 2 no. 57
On the Road With Wolverine.

i drew a cowboy with a skull
tattoo making
a 12-gauge hole
in a zombie torso
for my little brother.

drive your cart and plow over the bones of the dead

The bus driver Dolores has silver claws and a stud in her nose. She tells me where I'm goin. I wave goodbye to the pink gangsters. They roll another blunt and lean back, watching the girls commute their stuff around.

Dolores' patient voice crackles through the intercom: No smoking, no alcohol consumption, no drugs. If you do any of these you will be axed to get off the motorcoach. Hold on a second, we gonna have to turn around and go back to the garage. My windwhield wiper's actin up. This is gonna take 10 minutes y'all.

The fellers behind me are talkin crab legs: went down to China Town, got me some crab legs. That's what you gotta do, get some crab legs. Ain't no trip to China Town if you don't get some crab legs... One row up, a Mexican baby starts to cry but stops when he gets his bottle...I drank a Hagia Sophia that cost 200 dollars...

There's a red pontiac parked outside of the garage with iron grates in the windows. There's a billboard that says Got scrap metal? Get paid $$$.

rumble rumble
there not enuf leg
room
the engine purrs
large on a dogday
afternoon. st. louis
was the #1
most dangerous city
in america, but now
it's #2
beaten by...
and the winner is...
detroit! motor city
yo. the whole city
be purrin and rumblin
according to sumbumblin
danger danger
bark bark bark
the city turns people into
hungry paranoid
sniffing sniffling
K-9 units with eyes
like what's in your bag??

yellow-orange bloodshot souls
let us praise the highway patrol
hallelujah! just blink
and you'll be under
house arrest
with a dangerous detroit damsel
and infinite time
to purr and sizzle.
stir fry.

you can

chug hershey's syrup in a building made of bones.

no one beats my yummy yummy!

they wheeled me to the hospital
in a black mariah
my rhymes were so ill
the nurses caught on fire

now we all look pretty
in lobotomy city
sippin and slippin
like surly Scottie Pippen

true story

This woman gave birth to a purse. A designer purse, Dolce&Gabbana, real luxury, but you know, not a baby. The doctors ooohed and aaaahed. "Congratulations on your beautiful new purse!" the pediatrician said, handing it over to the mother, "Such a fabulous color!"

Well, a purse is still a kid, even if it is a purse. The purse was empty, except for those freshness packets. At night purse would cry. They didn't know what to feed it. Dad started buying things to put in it. Chocolates, phones, rings, cigarettes, magazines, what else do girls put in there?

"What school should it go to?" Mom would ask, cradling the Italian leather, "What instrument should it play?" "What languages should it learn?" "Koocheeekooocheekooo!"

vs.

When I was twelve we would sit around and draw pictures. I remember this older kid Owen drew a picture of me sitting on the ground in Jurassic Park drinking a can of Pepsi and flipping the bird to a velociraptor that was standing there with its tongue hanging out, in attack position, about to eat me. I thought that was the best drawing ever. It was all in 2d, everything in profile, black and white, and it was titled "Nikita vs. a Hungry Genetic Abomination."

Things I Noticed Today

Bycicle is spelled bicycle.
Some people can be happy talking on the phone
about sports all day.
On the street, everyone is looking at everyone, but pretending that they are not looking at anything.
Mona is very pretty.
People behind counters always take your money. They never give away anything, unless they think that you are very pretty.
Photos of gymnasts make me want to be a gymnast, but also make me want to stay away from gymnasts.

Twin Couches

The faster you go the flatter it gets. Makes us retardid. People young and old make damned faces behind the wheel. One woman looks like her face is pulled back with fish hooks. Her horse teeth glisten, tongue flaps in the air-conditioner gust.

Dead raccoons all over the road, a dead buck with its face half buried in the lawn of a used car dealership with a lawn ornament doe staring at him, immortal. I'm just resting, mothafucka!

God took away my computer, boy he came in through the window cut the screen right open sneakin cross the creakin floorboards makin noises like a decoy.

Aerodynamic are tarantulas who dance tarantella I tell ya.

Grow an aeroplane powered by all 8 legs and the crash sounds hairy Rachmaninov kaprrfchgroowoooffshhh.

The hairier the better, more louder and scarier than the most impenetrable filth; all it is is gulp gulp and suck and where the real maggots and parasites feed is out in the open for everyone to see.

Pipe the goods through cell walls and god if we don't feel our teeth rotting at each other's throats let the music blast our bellies full and rearrange clean the bugs off the windshield. The lives of insects are told in miles per hour and the splats they make.

Take sandpaper to your toes and steel wool to your skin for a fine finish. The best thing about neighbors is listening to them fuck. The people upstairs fuck like two grandmothers in a rocking chair contest. Hesitant creaking, weird muffled semi-moaning, semi-hard ons, semi-sucking, semi-sort-of-maybe-masturbation, saving up for retirement.

Warehouse wedding. The side door just barely open, and inside are 50 squaredancing vacuum cleaner horsemen. The polka, the electric slide, the line-dance, and the hip bone's connected to the 19th circle of hell. Cash. Love is a burnin' thing...

You may not agree with the thought about insects, but it's really about people, and it's only a semi-thought, semi-thawed.

say it's swell

say it’s swell
to sit and not
worry about getting
up or golly
it’s good
to lie down
and not think
about sitting
up or boy
it’s best
to break and not
bother working

Tar & Feather The Spic'n Span White Woman!

Laundry room mold pungent. The light bulb is left burning, too hot to touch. Otherwise a fuse blows and there are something like eight fuse boxes down there to dig through. Two quarters and a lighter (Get to the pockets, what's in the pockets???). Fuse boxes distribute electricity to the Villa while in the back room lurks the ghostface killah. I plunge my arm into the clogged tub filled with chilled foamy suds of green backwash. The drain is in the far right corner. Whatever is down there is soft, moist, filmy, like a possum that's been tenderized and filled up like a water balloon. I grab some of the stuff and it dissolves between my fingernails. I draw the arm out and up the length of it sits a gray river of wet lint and particles. The water level does not budge; it is still and opaque. I cannot see to the bottom of this gunky funk. The plungers, we have three. I chose Plunger #2, and the SLURP SLURP FLRP SLFRP BRFPFRRP BLRRFFRP PRFLPRURGHHRFP SLRFFSHSSS FLRR RPHHH SSHSH SHWOOOOOOOGHRRSSHFLURPF!
the water crawls down the drain leaving behind sediment records for the archeologists of the future. The plunger, a sacred artifact.

Very Rarely Seen Behavior

clean out your ears, boys and girls!
we all have Q-tips in our ears.
when you have
a thing
in your ear
you get
that look
on your face
unlike any other look
it can only mean
that you are
cleaning out
your ears

Vicious Little Dogs

A man in a dirty green jumpsuit and brown aviator sunglassees walks two of the smallest, most vicious-looking doogs ever. The dogs do not look downright vicious or deadly at first glance, but they project an insatiable hunger, the kind of quiet, blank rabidness one feels while being attacked by vampire bats that have had their senses scrambled by cellular signals and an unwavering invisible barrage of YouTube videos of people, desperate talking heads in twilighted blue-tinted bedrooms, lipsynching a song that is only good ironically.

One dog is on a leash. It looks like a bloated rat-kite being dragged along the pavement. The second dog looks like, and really is Mussolini, reincarnated as a tiny monstrosity. They could put dogs like this in vending machines in Japan and pass the whole thing off as an Internet hoax.

"No, these miniature dogs are not real. It was all a publicity stunt to get you to Tokyo so that we can shrink you and put you in a vending machine."

The public is bored with the same old inanimate variety. Cigarettes, sex toys, booze, bubble-gum, pulse-rifles, nano-bot cheeseburgers, we all have one. What we don't have, is one of you.

Mussolini is peeing on a wooden sign that says "Dobrovolny, Attorney At Law." Victor Dobrovolny has been trapped in the basement of his practice for two weeks. He has been taken over by a bacterium that he snagged on his vacation to the Congo, and is slowly mutating into a giant man-eating sloth. So far he has consumed his wife, who came to check up on him, and her Brussels Griffon, which kept barking even after it had been squeezed through his powerful, slimy new esophagus. Meanwhile, in the Congo, a certain kind of bird of paradise, after having brushed against Dobrovolny's head while pursuing a mate, has acquired Dobrovolny's likeness which, also being contagious, has spread to two hundred other indigenous bird species, so that 68% of all avians in the Congo now look like a middle-aged lawyer from Central Illinois.

Mussolini wonders, as he eats a frozen cicada exoskeleton in the gutter, who the other dog might be. Is it Stalin, maybe Trotsky or Zinoviev? It is definitely not Müller, but it is wearing a miniature Christmas sweater. "Why does he get a sweater," wonders the Italian dictator, "And not me?"

Past the miniature dog show walks a man with three VHS tapes that he got from the public library. The movies he got are Blow Up, The Bicycle Thief, and Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome. He must watch Beyond Thunderdome ten times in a row, because Tina Turner has been appearing in his dreams and brainwashing him. The other two movies he got simply as background filler to watch while he sharpens his stainless steel razor-boomerang.

As they pass each other, VHS diva zombie and the micro-dog man exchange glances, the kind where you examine someone from the inside out but pretend that you are really looking nowhere at all. VHS man peers into the brown aviator glasses of his enemy, trying to distinguish the position of his eyes, wanting to gauge how they jiggle, which way they vibrate, what color they are, while wanting simultaneously to scoop them out with a wooden soup spoon, throw them into an industrial-strength blender and make one of those viral "Will It Blend" commercials with the jumpsuit's optics, maybe throw in the dogs for effect.

The man in aviators studies his opponent thusly{
job: librarian;
psychological state: on drugs;
sum total: drug addict librarian;
articles: 3 VHS tapes;
titles: unknown;
sum total: probably porno;
clothing: fades jeans, color #CCCCCC, with bleach stains, t-shirt color #669999 with unrecognizable image and text;
haircut: buzz cut;
sum total: skinhead;
grand-total: drug addict librarian skinhead porno addict.
}