Brain Scramble

This past Saturday my good friend Subconscious Colours let me basically spew out some of my work with him on stage and I personally want to thank him for organizing the event, being kind enough to include me in his musical sorcery and shenanigans, and for being just the sort of creative whirlwind I really need to feel inspired.

The other artists at the show really blew my mind out of the water, and by that, I mean I think I've lost a bit of my sanity and hearing after the madness that was summoned out of their instruments and gear (as this was a noise show, this seems to be an indicator of the success, not the failure, of a performance). I wrote a poem inspired in part by Derek M. Poteat's performance that really evoked feelings of the beliefs people have about how the rapture is suppose to occur - fracturing, earth shattering loud. 

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the bassist went on stage

and in the orchestra pit, my brain was prepped for surgery,

he played the end-of-days anthem,

a lowly tone slammed against metal

that is destined to deafen the sinful

into soundless purity

And the volume, the bassist knew, must be so enormous,

so palpably huge, that it forces one’s atomic structure to break down

and align into new shapes

after hearing all of this, we are spiritually new beings

but I still am scheduled for a nine o’ clock brain scramble

because there exists no galactic level of soundwave

that can compel me to give up this angel

I’m holding hostage between my teeth

She has the four letter word she robbed from me

stored in her vial of Debt she collects from those

who have paid their due to the Almighty

but I never gave her a penny, and

she took my verbal talisman against evil

because no mortal should have such power

So the Angelic band of Assassins figured

if they can tooth pick out my brain,

as though preparing the meat for a sandwich platter,

the part of me where all of my words are gathered,

would spill out into my skull,

losing motor control, my jaw would go slack,

and the angel, with my charm against the devil,

will return unto God what I stole

from the good book’s footnotes.

Fuck.

When Ghosts Become Mermaids

And sometimes I have really absurd dreams, which in turn become poems. Forgive me.

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In this king of nightmares, I married

an old sweetheart who knew

the science of laughter

but not the magic act of lust,

a stocking gone one minute, the skirt

vanishing the next, how to make

all those blushes turn into good old blood

broiling in the heat of touch

And so I, just as clumsy,  

on this day of holy matrimony,

wore a turtleneck beneath a fabbed up

white jumper

an exercise in the poor Victorian gothic

and every time I passed him in the prep

before the ceremony,

anxiety tore across his face

just as my hands released an ocean

all on their own

all of this was swept under by dos “I dos”

His mood changed from fretting to elation,

and he led me by the hand to a pond behind the church

here was our consummation bed,

he said, “do not be afraid”

pulling me down beneath the algaic green surface

Great, a marriage unwanted seems to have been giving

it’s rightful omens

murder is never so poignant as it is at the first

of new beginnings

but soon, I found he was shoving pills into my mouth

upon submersion,

and I swallowed,

and breathed

“here, we must have our children.

I did not tell you lest you ran”

He implored, with a flick of his tail

and so I finally had the upskirt magician

I always wanted,

but inseminated, now I could not

leave, or the air would kill the unborn

and so this nightmare had me chained

to my worst fear

trapped, sedated by the light hitting the gentle

windblown current,

and full of babies

I cannot even fathom as a part of the pronoun

I

I am the mermaid’s slave

And modern medicine

is the surest way to tie the knot

on aquatic abduction

How The Heavens Do It

I made love to the known universe and it wasn’t easy

as what I could fathom as lover appeared

as a two faced moon & sun

one to the east, the other ever facing west

And sexual escapades were reductive

down to mere attempts at birthing nebula fish eggs

the sun, ever trying to get up his heat,

but the challenge is to not sear the female

into another Beatrice redacted in orange

And the moon face left craters in my skin

where our dimples did not quite parallel each other

her mountains on my plateaus,

her canyons crashing into my black hills

Then came their harem of constellations

and my cum cannot find enough

of it’s own bravado to infiltrate Virgo

or even Cancer and Ursa Major left me tattered and bent

but ready to fall into dippers that are fountains

draining into galaxy’s ambiguous black dot of a center

I am a salmon amongst stars

But I am the only one that dies for painting the sky a bruised purple,

an infernal red,

and for what? A school of suns and cracked out planets

I will never know