Boots Standing In Nothing

He used to be friendly to fish, walked around
with a cheekful of them, never swallowed, no sir – just
promenaded around supermarkets and
other hostile places with them in his mouth, a fan of
What Does Not Exist captured on the large Polaroid,
captured like a cave with a tail grabbed
by the tail – dragged into their
sweet midst because you know,

they had roots here, and they were friendly
to him right here, and didn’t judge what
he chose to let flop around and stink (internally, against them)
in his mouth, did they??? Showed him the ropes, oh
the ropes of his choice they were
not picky, showed him why he liked his life
before and why he didn’t like it now: was it because
everyone could smell his fish?
So why so ashamed of them now? Lips
sealed, seal your roots in polythene wrap
then squeeze them into rubber boots; now wade
into my Polaroid

leaning up against a tree large as life, on that field trip
caught and pinned down, thrust
a pill size of the tailed cave’s
living nothing into his beating heart.
They laughed but stood back unsure, ‘now you
have dominance over what you remember
now what???’ Unveiled, a face ripped off, replaced
with manure but though crude, it’s actually a fancy
revolving door letting out
and keeping in the oddities, tail thrashing,
the colorless fear-ribbon twirling in the underbrush, 
your soul a nursing home feeding like
Alien on your best field trip memory
but it was shit anyway but you had
fun anyway if only you had clean clothes.

A Bevy Of Bats

The insurrection was a kind of shelter to us, a familiar face
afflicted by the news that everybody got married yesterday.

Every action was so well choreographed within the ash
of the nebula – itself sprung like a fat dusty teabag.
Ignoring the drunk fireflies (those wannabe beacons) 

we were instead shown home through the smog via our bat-smart
echolocation, the dubious art of sending a blip and waiting
for it to bounce back,

slack-jawed, blood cells dripping on the black
dissuasive welcome mat but we’re home and

we’d successfully permitted the nebula into the mass dissatisfied.
The most influential among us earmarked a Soviet tank
for our leader, while the rest just opted for

cheesy high-tech hair, like exploring oil plumes
teased out of their scalps.
Lizard heat mid-vein burnt off the cold water hope

trying to flush down our slow advance to the throat;
all this pollution responded by threatening

to delete our party with a rude swallow. Then everybody just
blacked out. The mass dissatisfied turned into an old concept,

a bungled death; space movements didn’t dissipate
all that ringing of flying creatures in our ears.

Then our second in command got a rather dignified moniker:
‘So, DEAN OF NONSENSE,’ we all cheered, glad for him –

but he wasn’t properly protected by the others, so we said,
‘DEAN OF NONSENSE, pray tell us why you’d barter
the metaphor for the privilege to be televised?’ 

So protect those in your midst who know the first thing
about throwing bright pellets of sound at tin surfaces
lest everyone in our flight path gets a nervous breakdown.

My Bong Knows The Answers To Questions Asked Only In The Afterlife

My bong tells me that darkness is the abstract form of
the dark, so I ask it,
‘Does that mean other bonuses can be enjoyed in the dark?’
I reach through the blinds instead of waiting for
an answer and my hand feels the night, the cool
touch of the city’s sunglasses lying on the
bedside table, removed, and the rough, sandy sweat
across the city’s nosebridge, unhumped by said
sunglasses. It’s really, really a great city, and it’s also
really, really a great bong.

In life after death, people will keep busy playing Trivia Pursuit, our
days filled with such ‘important’ issues as ‘How much does
a stomach filled with twelve cheeseburgers stacked one
atop the other weigh?’ Does that mean me and my bong
are already dead, or something – or we’re already like, in the
afterlife? Because, you know, I know that answer?

Swamp Thing

I wonder what the creature is doing right now.
Drying its hideous fur (the broom bristles of a taxidermist) on a rock?
‘This method makes your liver hurt, Swamp Thing,
just like the funniest thing you ever
saw caused the lilies to cave in
and they never stopped sleeping all over
your green eyes. And you remember that nasty
kidney infection?

Everyone I know wants to meet the person
who’ll like them forever – but your main relief consists
in bagging the river, tying the bag
with daddy issues and instead
of watching it sink, it dodders there
on the sticky surface and you watch
it watching you: ‘An iceberg.’
Poor analogy, buddy. More like
three heads poking out of a hessian sack – because
your daddy had three heads, and the swamp’s
method of disarmament came with a clever, if dangerous,
twist: the ruling plant life saw that three heads
poking out of a hessian sack and bouncing around
like that was the funniest thing you ever saw…

Survival Guide

Oh nice carjacking stance. I saw it
once in the pool hall, and I hated
the guy, but now considering it
in relation to carjacking – yeah, nice. I’ll
write about it. One day.

Hey nice lapdance maneuver. Wait, what?
Oh I’m not sure I can describe THAT!
Harr - the glowing smile. Perhaps I can draw it
using great blotches of magic marker? You really
have to, though - have long teeth like that? What
color best describes a smile both winning and
I’d-rather-eat-dog-food-than-bring-my-nose-close-to-your-
forehead? I’ll try the one where you have
to be fainthearted. (Yellow mixed with black.)
How does faintheartedness pay?

No I’m not really in it for the money.
I love banned science. Hahahaha, no no
I’m not a scientist: I write survival guides
for lunatics. Just sort of urban ones – you
don’t actually have to be lost in a park
or stoned out of your mind to benefit from it.
You don’t have to be a hiking boot lover/expert/fetishist
or know the words and phrases most hated
by wild parrots. Just a couple of brain cells
have to scrambled, harr.

Correct. You just have to be crazy.
You’ll be amazed: LOTS of crazy people
need survival. Some bat at moon shadows
with spatulas and big leaves and
hoses and stuff and they’re really
afraid, hurr. Perhaps if I could just teach
them to do it with their elbows up
just so and their knees bent like pingpong
champions it’d be OK.

Perhaps the moon would just hate them
and move on, harr-harr.

Secret Lives Crave Tautology

My personal trainer took off the stylish scarf
that he wore everyday – a trademark really, an item found invariably
in caricatures of him – and revealed a horoscope writer
who had hung himself a thousand times.

Now, this was an impersonation of his fate tackily written
but unavoided. No, it's not farfetched, nor overly insensitive, to say
that removing the scarf and seeing his self-styled horoscope
on his neck – seeing those hang-marks –
was a bad tattoo in retrospect.

How fake would such a personal trainer
need to be to be
so optimistic and
devil-may-care? Horoscope fake, that's how fake.

There's actually no good reason for the ten-minute gaps
in the radio personality's evening shows – apart
from the fact that these spaces are meant
to be filled by some fantastic, ecstasy-fueled verbiage
his dachshund, sitting on his lap, is urged
to blither into the microphone.

Of course its silence is lurid testimony to its muteness.

From the tension he obtained such beautiful half-moon cuticles,
effected somehow with a Donald Duck-handled screwdriver,
but the ends of his chewed fingers
looked like sunset swamps.
The technician on the other side of the glass
became dishabille in a way
that lifting one's head and espying him, or bumping into him
in the corridor, was like getting anthrax in the mail.

In terms of appearance, cold silence or crackling anticipation
does something to one's nipples:
the nipple dome tautology, it's called.
Because that's exactly what it is. A thing atop a thing.

Resurrection Mishaps

Someone has died and it’s seemingly
impossible to resurrect him. See, he’s
sitting in a meditative lotus position in
the chickenshit muck, probably humming like
mysteriously before copping it, humming
through duct tape strapped over his mouth, flies
buzzing around his head, the hummus stench of
the chicken coop in his nostrils. Nostrils
that couldn’t ventilate themselves because of
the duct tape blocking off circulation.
The coop’s hot corrugated tin roof
buckles in the heat above ours heads – and if
to know you were going to die wasn’t
bad enough, you also had to turn into
a hemp cocoon in the process, from the
press of chicken feathers around you, chicken
breath, chicken shit and the sauna griffness of
this truly makeshift-looking dwelling…
Poor bastard was trying to meditate and
resurrect himself in advance, knowing he’d
die and shuddering for an instant – at the
thought of what he’d look like when discovered:
you know how butterflies fold themselves up
in cocoons, you know they’ve been practicing this
for centuries, and you know on
the outside they wouldn’t divulge this
meditative posture, knowing how silly
a mysteriously contemplative cocoon must
look. This was just part of the great
embarrassment, probably, for the corpse-to-be,
and out of human compassion you try to resurrect
him. But a miracle excludes all collapse of life,
and trying to bring this sucker back to life
is a collapse of the miracle itself. If not the whole
goddamn chicken coop. He looks like my great
aunt’s head when she had slathered dye on it.
And smells that way too.