COUCH SURFING

It’s a pilgrimage intended to make HIV exciting, but bring a refined gavel (engraved foliage is recommended), because the orgy won’t take place in a gift shop like last time – we’ll be making many stopovers at porcelain shops instead, where things simply break differently. A retro clock with a Marmite face dents like tin, and there’s nothing funny about that – it’s just not appropriate for our purposes.

Well, the lice-ridden couch surfer was gratuitously hostile. He was out of his element on the shuttle carrier because there weren’t any couches, and once he saw Harriet’s toy smurf he developed an obsession and went smurf scouting in each and every compartment of the shuttle sporting a red, desperate face and grated, eczematic knees, driving people from their sleep.

Perhaps this time I won’t be talking never-ending about getting outsmarted by the senile vacationer. I won’t be making bold claims about how drunkenness empowers jelly (and/or swimming vision, vision swimming drunk at dusk, or under an infrared light in brain warmth) – how avoiding the eye in the castle of jelly on the tray is key to outsmarting hangover shits and headaches. These are lame distractions from the fact that I had failed in the battle of wits with that crazy old man.

‘If you love stem cells,’ the couch surfer cried out with a genuine cry in his voice, ‘you will all chip in and convert this vulgar blob that used to be Martin into a smurf!’ He was just being greedy; we all knew he was at his rope’s end. He hadn’t found a single smurf in the shuttle, and now he wanted us to yield what stems cells we could pick out of our hair and convert someone’s friend (‘Martin’ - who’d deliquesced at the sight of a naked Avatar who’d swung by on a rope) into a smurf! He made it very plain – as only desperate people could – that he had no interest in reanimating the original person. ‘Martin,’ whoever the fuck that was.

Lust as much inhabited (and destroyed) the scaffolds of run-of-the-mill cells as heat inhabited the tabloid tiger: rolling over in the middle of the night, with a groan, we’d very intricately break. Like the box of fleeting sensations none of us traveled without. Not even the loathsome couch surfer. We wore grimy contact lenses. Everything in the pictures we took ended up looking like secondhand water features. Watery, but with a vague semblance of structure. Including the tiger: its heat looked like a series of overused icicles. Just like in the tabloids.

IN HELL

Are you glad there is a thing like strawberry chemistry?
Then it would be polite to share your ulcers.
They are strawberries in end-state chemistry.
Hell-development is going down – 
a portion of the air guitar is still slightly grainy, however.

As the eBay description says: ‘Doesn’t grate
knuckles all the way.’ The less Hell, the more
gap mouth the guitar.
If you weren’t so into water aerobics,
it would have been the magnified cloud – floating
around in it and with an inexplicably lazy tongue
saying ‘Soup.’ All the time. For no reason.

‘“Soup,” I say this a lot,’ you would’ve said a lot.
‘“Soup,” “Cloud,” “Float,” “Fart,”’ I say all
the time,’ you would’ve said all the time.
In the left hemisphere of my brain, the
maid had left the pop-up timer, and so

I’m going to have to kill her – or phone iMaid
and demand they stop processing
the 3LG 90000 model, because this (I will explain)
‘[feels] like a deer root canal;
extending to the horn, where a soda can
explodes, and despair’s foam is curbed 

by an ineffectual busted sneaker, placed
before a storm drain.’ Mona Lisa
home-made in Hell, fallen into despair,
with tusks (rapidly expanding soda pressure – see
what I did there?), trying out, very tentatively, her
own personal failings; on a Kawasaki 50cc; watching them go.

But in Hell personal failings are everywhere. And so
are Kawasakis.

As are Mona Lisas.   

OLDER COUSIN FREDDY

drunken manipulation by carnie of plush toy grapnel
high up twiddling legs like palsied squid
acrobat suddenly develops huge hungry eye
hard not to lose balance drooling over
safety net dragged in from carnival:

carrion harvest

‘come in and explore my tent –
i shall please you with neon lunch’
a spookiness to murder-leftover formation, something
even more off-putting in mcnugget hemorrhage

quick panicked breaths hinging on central
empty lung of firmly gripped

margarita

anybody hear the horrible squelch yet?
no, the mime has not yet absorbed his mask

princess leia’s first day as daycare nurse represents
biggest failure in popular culture since my best
friend’s latest miserable defeat as proxy groom
‘you are the worst proxy groom in the history of
proxy grooms, Harry,’ pointing at him

a cuticle-mad

finger ‘ghetto extraordinaire though you may be, no
groom which unfortunately won’t be able make it
to his wedding on account of business or untimely
disease or whatever will ever hire a

clown like you

again’ dweller of the lost, door-less room – foot-deep
in a cathartic daze, alone with dvd box set unveiled
by darkness the instant whom we shall know
merely as ‘older cousin freddy’ abandoned

it ‘down your chernobyl gullet,’ three-eyed tailless
mermaid says to chorus of filthy gawkers, pouring
green gummy liquid

down throat

everyman batteries run low faster than clone
batteries all clones therefore beginning to look
quite ordinary ‘ultra fast and ultra flappy – not
to mention comfortably

padded and reinforced,’ 

market crier described through bullhorn fishtail
prosthesis twitching in cage

VIKINGS SANK THE CANOE

These buttons are great for yoga.
Yoga is great for bad hair days.

Paranoia: put out your wig!
It is on fire!
Come join us!

The master is not busy leveraging the cliché.
He is saying:
‘Come, fear not!’

‘Scared of the hyperactive bathroom?
Bad vibes good for bowels!’  
Fear is paisley cheeks. 

(My wish list is finally getting the idea.)
Singapore blight.
Lights sitting on eyelids.
Cool.

Cool: I do love Alzheimer’s gimmicks. 
This button, if I press it.
Ngh ... whazzackly would it do??

Viking walk-in closets clang
on the shoulders and hips
of the embonpoint.

Like the man whose psyche
grips him tight with hard clumsy
blunt paws lest he runs away naked
yodeling free. 

‘Fear is itself not a fearful entity.
‘Fear if taken out of context, I mean.’
[Master clears throat politely, embarrassedly.]
‘It likes cereal.
‘It was born in a canoe.’

Is there any truth to the rumor
cities will go faster if I let go?
Why so many commercials about
decomposing and about decomposition?

Wielding my outsize Victorian hat under the bus sign.
Hair lice helpfully weigh in on my companion’s
braiding problems in the morning.
Whistling.

I feel so useless.

IN A TAXI GOING SOUTH

My ticket stub is lying in the mess of receipts on the passenger floorboard. Cops at roadblocks don’t look forgivingly upon chaotic floorboards, and the skillet lost in its chaos might prove dangerous to them. A lenient God would hope I will survive what’s coming, because I’m kinda crappy and He knows it. I’ll try harder next time. 

A mattress of ticket stubs and receipts and bills is an oasis, and honesty about the lost ticket stub is a contagion. Nobody outside the criminal world, I’m sure, thinks of things this sweetly. There simply doesn’t exist a dispensary for self-assembling grocery bags. I will have to invent one. I bet the instant the world straddles this runaway gallbladder aesthetic, soap opera smiles would be beamed down by satellites; knives in crime dramas would expertly and jovially slice through the degenerate strands of drool hanging from them.

‘I’m the one everyone came to see, officer. I’m a professional dancer.’ His smug grin shatters.

‘You mean to say you’re – ’

‘Yes.’

A flicker of doubt. Cops are so easily taken in.

‘M-move along.’

 

I FEEL BAD ABOUT THE SANDWICH

Ever wonder at which premier spot exactly the sandwich was dropped from a flying saucer? I will tell you. It was dropped at a premier surfing destination.

No kidding. 

Ever wonder how a dirty menu can be utilized as a costume? I don’t know either, but I do know a skunk in my garage which dons a ski mask at full moon, then looks like a slanted-eyed puppethead; it thinks it is safe as long as you tell it what to say. Menus do that. Even the dirty ones – the ugliest menu can feel bloated on self-confidence as long as it believes the items you read off it are words you put in its ‘mouth.’

I feel bad about the sandwich. It was I who dropped it from the UFO. And I feel bad about the skunk – to make up for it I gave it that Stockholm Syndrome training device which it dutifully straddles when the moon isn’t full and really grinds those tiny tendons in its front and hind legs, its little claws scrabbling on the treadmill and causing the hairs on everybody in the vicinity’s neck to stand on end. Before long, I don’t think it would have any difficulty saying, ‘YOU ARE MY EVERYTHING.’

THE PRINCE

The prince was found dead surrounded by a fascinating but frightening assembly of petshop merch, seeds mostly but here and there a snake hook and a gigantic fish net lay crammed violently in the mud. Instruments of the paranoid and obsessive pet owner. Life at the palace had become unendurable – the complete alienation of the palace ducks was incredibly hard to take. He realized that the ducks weren’t seeing him with loving fondness or even understanding anymore and the way he came to realize this was both tragic and entertaining: on Broadway, a Klingon ship was revealed to the audience, of which the prince was a part, to be a green scrawny chest floating in space. This was what you got when you did a nubbin by nubbin breakdown of the chest cloaking your pet’s appreciation of your love. You came up empty-handed and aghast. Artificial thunder struck a mirror lying flat on the stage – an impressive display of trapped energy roiling submissively in a reflective surface on behalf of Klingon vanity, but it brought all eyes on the prince, who wished only to be seen by his ducks.