The Power of Silly Putty and Lipstick Kisses
Janelle Finamore
Heaven
I see a reflection of Heaven through your eyes
God is eating dinner in your Iris
In a gingerbread house
While angels dance in gypsum snow
You must have seen it somehow
Capillary waves of clouds that expand
To swells with the jelly of joy
I stare and want to be drawn in by the pupil of your pupil where the Guardian Angel lives.
Together we’ll fly and rest on a diaphanous angel wing of the new Golden Universe.
I dive into your eye- a white kingdom of charity and pleasantries, leaving grey dusk behind.
Mother
I open a rusty tin of preserved images
Pictures of snow angels
A spiritual paradise
It was right before her death
She had eaten a soup made of fear
I stare at the old days
There was a rainbow of luck that shone upon her
She refused to hold onto it
Instead, sent to a kingdom of aqua pleasure
Where Fur Elise was being play all day
Her favorite song
If anything could please her, I would have tried
I could lie on asphalt all day and blame myself
Or drown in barrels of effortless shame
With Mozart’s apparition whispering
“It’s not your fault”
But I know it could be
A saveless suction coup of emotions
Drawn in like lint to vacuums mouth
Not a penny or hair tie can escape
A voice of power and desperation
A thunderous outburst as timid as a mouse
Eating in bed, sleeping at dinner
Friction, tension filled oxygen
Filling the lungs of everyone around
The Presence
Did I even want to save her?
She didn’t want to save herself.
Wearing mask upon her already made mask,
She smiles
Peel off paper Mache
So we can view a bare face
Of tired wrinkles
Shallow breaths
Bright lights scream
Shouting
Directions to the special place
Of serenity
For all of us to share
We are glad you are there
And despite your decayed heart
We will miss you here
The Power of Silly Putty
Shell upon shell
Encasing some mollusk
Some soft thing in a hard case
Like a soldier dressed in armor
Underneath- a soft, shining fellow
Unwilling to die
Unwilling to fight
Sparks
Lightning
Striking blows
On far off paradise cities
Turned bitter
Soured places now.
Against. Against us.
Horrible!
Pointless!
Simplistic!
Base!
Id!
Silly!
Silly putty on
Newspaper headline- “Terrorism”
“9/11”
Children reading the silly putty.
Ignoring it.
Reforming it.
They put it on a comic instead.
Light.
Weightless.
Feather words.
Colorful
Charlie Brown’s joy.
Let’s change for the children.
It’s the least we can do.
Papery Soul
I want to capture your kind words
In my mouth and savor their taste
Flooding my taste buds and spreading
To all my twenty senses
I was born special with super hearing and super feeling
And other useless senses
Marble statue stands upon marble statue
And they topple
Break into pieces
And lying on cement
Is the tootsie center of lollipop,
The eye of the hurricane,
The nucleus of cell,
The heart imprisoned in heart’s case
Your icicle heart
I must save it before it melts
It’s such a rarity to find it
To crack the shell
Without a nutcracker
I want to bury myself into a moment with you
And stay there under the stone
Please try to reverse the usual associations of your mind
And conform to a cheap and thin papery soul
That refuses a scissors’ cut
That is bitten by neglect
Become a thicker stationary
Then paste yourself onto me
Staving Artist
The rent keeps rising
I keep burning incense to ignore it.
Red fire flame in my belly
A curse from the dragon fellow.
The pupil of my right eye is larger than the pupil of my left. They call it Adie eye.
My apartment sweats in heat.
The universe screams in pain due to rotting age,
Time never ending
Souls of my lamps dead
Along with T.V ghosts’ flickering static
Peacocks in mansions
Cockroaches laughing in freeway apartments
Green curse bestowed upon the kingdom
It’s really really time to get a real job!
Primordial Soup
I dove into the primordial soup and went unconscious
Hitting my head on earth’s zygote.
Seven days later, God revived me and the
Universe appeared.
God is some kind of scientist who knows the formula
For how to create time and gravity constants
with an ever-changing landscape of
Continents and Oceans beneath Him.
He is a selfish bastard for not publishing his formulas and ideas.
And leaving us in the dark existentialist earth-bound place
struggling for meaning.
When we die, we can only hope to move to space with Him and help out as one of his office clerks.
Eventually, we can be promoted to Earth Manager or Continent Constructor.
We will sit down in conference rooms with Him and His team of brilliance
So they can give us an evolved PowerPoint Presentation
Of how the world was created in seven days including
Breakdowns of formulas and their origins.
The office work of Heaven will undoubtedly be the most challenging career of our Eternity
especially if God is the CEO.
Walk the Line
Walking on a boat made of jewels
Breaking the bread phone
next to my pool of green pills
I’m hallucinating as usual
And a crying letter is being written
I’m as tall as the altitude of a flying plane and feel like singing a tune of the wind
That rushes by the windows of the window seats
Puddles of clouds on my floor
Puddles of my sweat at your door
As you open it, with frustration
But your intentions are salvation
I’m filled with regret, humiliation
You saved me
So marry me
*Note: Poem inspired by the Johnny Cash movie, Walk the Line.
Ashputtel
Looking for your Ashputtel
Finding false brides
Building castles with the clouds
Making glass with the sand’s lightning
Cloud buckets pour
Glass trinkets soar
Confusion in the mind’s eye
Clarity in your thousand petals
Enter the door of hope that crushes fear
Saw down ugly options
Feel around in the mud for that lost diamond
And place it on her sad finger
Blew me a kiss
You blew me a kiss
I felt it on my lips
Then we fell into a love lake
After a two mile walk in the dark
You blew me an orgasm
And the water carried it to me
The ducks were jealous
And the park was turned on
Worm
A worm being operated on is not such a pretty sight.
In fact, anyone who saw this would be full of fright.
The doctors with their scalpels and knives,
What will they tell their wives?
“Oh, honey, today at work was great!
This worm had a tumor and I needed to operate!”
The wives will worry how the mortgage will be paid.
With this line of work who wouldn’t be afraid!
But the husbands are confidant that saving worms
Will profit more then killing germs.
They open up a business down the road
First helping worms and then wounded toads.
Your father drugged me at the bar
Fell asleep inside your mind
We slept together soundly
Woke up and ate a mountain for breakfast
And drank a lake
Blatant honesty
Humbles me
Suffering
Pleasantly
Gripped your body and felt inside your mouth
My tongue felt nice against yours
Sun shone through the window in your eye
The faded wallpaper was only fading inside your words
Our breath collides and forms one wind
You are two people lying next to me
I kiss one
The other disapproves
Your father drugged me at the bar
Your father drugged me at the bar
Speckled my thoughts with curiosity
Leaves that cut through a finger
Like a paper cut in office shadow
Spent money on you
You still went away like a bad golden egg
In Johnny Depp’s world
Fell asleep inside your mind
Dreamt the same dreams
You still left for Massachusetts
Early Sunday morning
Without me
Futile Angel
There is an angel living in my boyfriend’s stomach
That protects his hole from growing bigger
She uses a mini sewing machine
to sew the seems together
Because otherwise he would die
eating grease and tons of animal fries
But one day,
he shit out the angel covered in pie
then he died
Ghazal
Kisses from a dove
On lipstick stained stationary
As rare as a human flying
Is a blue-winged swan with a short neck
Don’t forsake the color sheer
Similar to the color clear
The blood stained rectangles float
In your wrists
Wring out the towel with a twist
And words of contempt will drip to the drain
Take your SSRI’s every day at five
Simply to survive
Flower face
Mold your face into a flower and make it smell pretty for me
Fly to the moon on a man made wing
And when you arrive,
Put a flag there and sing.
Salesmen
The salesmen have lion mouths that rip apart our wallets
Might as well put the money in a shredder and walk away!
Stealsmen!
Swindling fools drinking vermouth at a a bar alone
They’ll always be alone
With dirty fingernails and crusty toes
Dishes piled to the door and a garbage fragrance in their living rooms
Lonely sheet with social dreams
Forbidden sensuality
They are as transparent as the crystal cupids that shatter through glass hearts.
Shed some light upon the situation
Little hearts pop up everywhere and
Start bursting when you’re around
Like one of those eighties pop up video shows
Or something….
Candied flames burn on the asphalt
The rainbow light bulb of my thinking-self
Comes to a semi-epiphany
But the lampshade keeps this realization dim.
Blinking breaths of fresh tears
Breathing tears of blinking eyes
Smelling your kiss with my lips
Your smile rings in my ears through the corridor
Of time
And the corners of my inner heaven
Your soul within my soul
Within your soul within my soul
Within His
Where has He gone?
A missing word to the crossword game
That we never finished
It’s sitting on a polka dot desk
Next to a small artificial sun
Covered in green
The puzzle has not been solved
And no true light has been shed
Upon the situation.
Folk Song
The streets were wearing gold and in five minutes
A woman grew cold
I wanted to remember a time
When money didn’t matter
When people didn’t fight to win
Green marks the scars of the sin
Fancy cars are not the mark of success
What matters more is care
Like the mother bird tends to its nest
The streets were wearing gold and in five minutes
The woman grew old
Beautiful ladies as trophy wives
Again we see another disguise
The streets were wearing gold and in five minutes
The women were sold.
Mermaid City Story
Through small binoculars
Through the tropical ocean
Is a microscopic mermaid city
Empty buildings
Salons
As ancient as drive in theaters
The city eaten away
By a team
Of piranhas
Fish so deadly, they bit through
The protective gold shark
Security cage
Which encased the city
The remains of their history, their government and pop culture-
All written on seashells
And seaweed
An intricate system of marriage
Blueprints for office buildings
A map with directions to land for mermaid scientists to investigate
Human life
Schools, hospitals- obliterated
Buried under the sea’s ashes
Like Pompeii
With microscopes, we can dissect the mermaids and find out more about their existence
In the underwater city
Imagine how many tiny little cities there are
That we cannot see
One on every particle and space of earth perhaps
But we never thought to look for them.
In fact, just the other day,
I saw,
In the crevice of a cliff,
A tiny talking bear society
Trapped in a honey jar
So, I opened the jar and set them free as I
Continued on with city exploration
Poem
I forgot to take the peach basket of your breaths, which
whispered words I could not here.
I think you might have mentioned that I’m like a statue goddess that flies as light as a feather.
At night, I turn the pages of your book that you wrote, to see a flower weeping.
I see a crying bunny and a leaf sleeping.
There’s a unicorn carrying a basket of letters
I rub my hands together
And wish
For clarity in these letters
I sense your fluttering heart and know
We have some twisted love unfound
As the table refracts illuminating lights on the letters, I open them
One by one
And decipher the meaning
With the hope
That you love me after all
Turtle
The turtle makes a call to his ornery old aunt.
“Aunt Diana, I want to come out of my shell but I can’t!”
She says;
“Slowy, have you taken your Paxil so you can come out with ease?”
“But I don’t want to change my true self can’t you see?
I’m not like the butterfly or the bee;
I’m a mere turtle with social anxiety.
Can’t everyone just accept this fact?
Or do I always have to put on an act?”
His aunt replies,
“ But you said you want to come out!
So what is this call all about?”
“I thought I wanted to come out but now its clear.
I like it in my shell and it’s not because of fear.
I’m shy and introverted and like to read.
I like my shell and it’s what I need”.
“Well if you know what you want, please do not make these midnight calls.
Next time, I will not listen at all!!”
Answer to Keats’s Ode
How can one be so sure
That bards like me have heaven’s lure?
I stay here on earth, though I’ll be leaving soon.
With the whisper of heaven’s trees,
I may not reach those heights with ease.
Hell may beckon from below,
A perfume scent with a striking blow.
The roses and golden histories,
To me do not so much appease.
Divine melodious truth
For me, may not apply, I’m too uncouth.
Bard of passion and of dread,
I left my soul in my bed.
Hung it up on the line
Then they buried it in the ground, how’s that for divine?
Hermit
Solitude is the present of the present
Past of the past
It’s future’s future
Hermit in cave-house on lonely hills.
Penniless writer associations.
God and his angel assistants
Created me this way
So this is how I’ll stay
No medicine to reform me
He grew from a seed out of nowhere
Plant God
Wants me to be toxin free
Of mind alterations
But it’s so hard
What about wine?
It’s in the Bible!
I don’t really want to be this way.
Fighting a losing war with the Creator/Destroyer
An uproar within me
I think of Mother and evil best friend
Nature versus Nurture stirs my Mind’s brain cells
“It’s both!”, He explains.
“There is nothing wrong with being a loner. Are you insulting my work? You are the creative juice for world entertainment!”
I drink two bottles of Merlot
As I sit by the fire alone and write
a short story of a literal hermit crab
Who was King of the beach creatures
Queenless and lonely.
The White Violin
The white violin
As pure as angel’s lips
Cries
Tears sit like dew drops on her milky body
And soak through the strings
The music echoes
Through the courtyard of
A melancholy ear
Who becomes a prince to the violin
Who listens
And kisses
Pain turns to tiny dust clouds
Swept away with feathers
As love commences
Circus World
Silly clowns running over grey dusk sunlight
Specters of clowns falling down shooting stairwells
Laughing all the way down
Sighing and wishing they were real people
In the circus world
Trapeze swinger, hunter of food
Falling into net
Trapped
as food himself
Dead to the audience
oblivious to his state of mind
Freeing up the drug induced mind alterations of
sleep paralysis and goblins in dark corners of the bookshelves that you can only see in schizophrenic episodes
Glass shattered on the floor of globes as he travels along walking on the ocean shore
Take a step back away from the day
Fall into the hole behind the hole and land in yesterday
Change what you did
Have a new today
Don’t become a clown or a circus elephant
You may need to stay in the four walls
Even if you’re typing 10 key for hours under
fluorescent lights in a dark corner next to
bitchy women
Spider Web
The sick spider weeps in his web, which is full of ideas
For constructing the maps of the cave, so that
Spelunkers can navigate
And find the golden treasure that hides in the dark
Crevices and
Screams in silence
Its desire to be adopted,
Like an orphan who runs in her false home
Hoping for a reprieve, but
The treasure remains hidden
Because the spider has breathed his last breathe,
And the final instruction
Has not been woven.
Little poem trills
I want to catch shooting stars on my tongue
I washed my hair with whiskey today and the strands are giddy with laughter
I sold my lottery ticket to my hen yesterday since he is was in dire need of money and get this- HE WON!
My best friend called and told me the big news. She laid her egg yesterday and everyone is wondering if it is a boy or a girl. Turns out it was just a watermelon.
I powdered my nose with an axe. My face was red instead of that matte flesh colored oil-free look that I was going for.
There was no money for dinner. So I cooked us all some unfamiliar mushrooms from the backyard and we saw gay monkeys dancing on the table drinking brandy while singing YMCA
I am living in a milk world breathing milk through my nostrils and feeling constantly lactose intolerant.
I could not find my screwdriver yesterday. Today I saw it driving home in my car and told it to ask me permission next time before borrowing my car!
Corporate Black Hole
Flutters of creativity dampened by the corporate black hole of racing rats.
Paddle faster!
Faster!
Can you keep up?
Most likely not.
And the wheel keeps accelerating as you and the rats lag behind.
Time is our vicious callous friend that’s there for us when we need him
But, He flakes on us when He’s too busy and impatient to wait.
Time!
Wait up for me!
I just need a spark of creativity!
A poem a song, you can hum along.
But it’s too late and it’s already eight.
My eyes are sleepy and suddenly the sharp beep blurs my dreams.
The carpool lane is full of traffic.
The coffee waits steaming fresh and sugary in its mug
next to the phone, which begins to ring incessantly.
Paper doll
You are nothing but a paper doll being dressed and undressed with a variety of paper outfits
The confetti fades away
The outfits are removed
Nothing is left of you-
All we see is a naked paper doll with a plastered painted smile
Someone tore you in two
Your top half is thrown away
Now you are nothing but half a paper doll
Chocolate Tea
My heart melts like sugar squares in chocolate tea
You take so long to decide
You’re slower than a snail’s shadow
I’m sitting here waiting
Staring at spiders on TV
Looking outside
Blow up boats floating in the community pool
Happy children sailing
The afternoon, peeled away by the Hands of the Immortal
Reading romance novels in the dark
As the ghost of God whispers some creepy hope
The blood-drenched carpet is my last sight
Meet me someday
Piano
I’m tired of your talking.
Spit a piano out of your mouth.
If you must, turn your teeth into keys
Play with gusto
But not too loud please.
Rock Song
Beckoning from the depths of Hell
I hear your call
I want to go down there and be with you
But I can’t
Purgatory holds my hand to tight
The excitement of your fire filled world
Consumes me with curiosity
and intrigue
But unless I trip and fall
I will stay here
And watch you from a telescope
Looking into your world
As you stare hopelessly
Upward and pound on glass
Like an ice-skater
Knocking on ice
Trying to find water
I wave goodbye
Knowing that our two worlds will collide
Like salt water meets fresh
We won’t blend, but this is for the best
Ill just obsess over you and take the photographs as you stay the same
Age
In Eternity
Electronic Faith
Underneath the black and blue sky
Is a small robotic Jesus
Slowly rising
From the dead
His gadget crown
With broken battery
Left behind
Superhumans pray to Him
Expecting miracles
But the fallible
Technological Nature
Fails
Breaks
Freezes
Heaven, the world’s largest computer
Crashes down on Earth
The true Apocalypse
The sun had already died
We survived it
But the bits and pieces of screen, hard drive, keys
Kill the superhumans
Vast white
Nothingness
Dead Earth
Dead God
Some other mad scientist will create a
new experiment that will also last a few billion years
One day, a new Lord of Science
The Greatest and Most Brilliant Of all time,
Will construct
An immortal planet
With immortal creatures
Strange Looking Girl
Eyes the size of watermelons
Pupils the size of oranges
Hair that flows to the earth’s core
A nose that extends further than Pinocchio’s
Ant foot sized feet
You are a strange looking girl!
Desert
Running through the rainforest of a wasteland
Searching for the mirage
But, it’s not water I’m seeking this time
A thousand notes of paper and music pour from the sky
Lightning bugs carry them like storks
Dropping into my palm
Your specific tear on the notes
My specific wink closes
I hear the notes of a minor key sounding elated
Notes of a major key resounding sadly
I’m still seeking my mirage
I’ll always be seeking, hoping, moping
Never finding
4001 A.D.
Closed parallel universes with membranes.
What’s the true universe?
Like a barrel of monkeys within a barrel of moneys, an outer space is within a larger outer space
which is within another larger outer space and so on.
Invisible sight through highly advanced telescope called something else now
Universe to universe within universe becomes travel with expensive gas- the new theme park of Eternity
where a minimum height is required for the ride.
Crossing green carpets of aqua stars
Stopping for fuel and snacks on islands of asteroids
Time remains immaculately unscathed
The universe needs a new name.
Images
Beauty in the eye of a toad
A frog’s leap to a sinking lily
Fairy dust on her teeth
Santa’s blood on her sheet
Christ’s crown in her belly
Poseidon’s rain drips down her face
Dear Laymen,
If you are there and listening
I will tell you,
It is not such an easy thing
To write a poem to you.
You are picky, trite,
And ornery at times
Although some of you are appreciative, I still attest
That it is not easy to come up with some
Fancy interesting line
That rhymes
Or has some deep meaning for you to contemplate
So be kind to me in your readings
And reviews
And I will try my best
To please myself
And then, maybe you.
Mark Ryden (and Other Images)
Meat and Lincolns
Big-eyed girls
Candy in rivers
Running in swirls
A root gets an operation from stuffed teddy bears
Forests populated by chairs
Bloody children and T-bone steaks
The tears of Christ forming a lake
Glass apple trees melting on walls
Zeus stands proudly on Olympus, then trips and falls
Poem
Our wallpaper is your angry crayoned words
In the corner of your eye is a small
Wounded bird
Screaming in pain, tears rush down his feathers
Drenched and sick, yearning for pleasure
Little bird, fly into my soul and rest your feet
Upon my shoulder
We can start a companionship like anxious clay
Starting to mold into
A statue of love coated in fear
Flattening to silly putty on a comic, we hear
The chatter of humor, the drawings of life
Like two tin cups on a string we unite
Struggling with communication
The string is cut
Two rolling cups approaching a gutter
Hoping some stranger will find us and tie us together
Video Games
Your video games destroy us like the glacier that sunk the Titanic
As you kill snipers, I beg for pearls
Pillows on the floor and bugs on the sofa
As unkempt as unwatered grass turned yellow
And you just sit there indulging and escaping into a mere big screen TV
As I sink to the bottom
Of the orange ocean
Glazed over with snow
Turned to ice
Unable to poke a hole
We couldn’t even afford a knife
Meeting Love in a Dream
Among the paper fish and make believe clocks*,
there is a small cardboard aquarium and a little live cuckoo that makes its nest in the fake clocks
The flowers of the wallpaper are scented and the room is filled with the nostalgia of lilac
This is where we met
Where the sun entered the room as liquefied heat that melted time and left a sticky honey substance
On the floor for us to mop up
We laid naked on marshmallow pillows
We kissed under a paper Mache mistletoe
So it didn’t mean much
We wore grey wigs and flamboyant tissue paper costumes
We had white painted faces and drank vanilla whisky with shots of boysenberry
We laughed at our poetry that we would read to each other
I could not imagine anything more delightful than meeting love in a dream.
*From Leonard Cohen’s poem Story from Let Us Compare Mythologies.
Poem
I am a crime Scene Investigator
Entering the underworld
Cathedrals aflame
Black peaches on trees alongside
rows of asphodel
Scraps of dead children’s artwork
Scratch art, Christmas trees carefully cut out of construction
paper
Clues- bathtubs brimming with glass touched blood
Broken furniture and plates
The dead fish babble to each other indecipherable words
(My translator can hear underwater and gives me some meaning)
Some of the souls here were framed
The true villains rest on rainbow clouds of Heaven
Unjust is unjust
I must speak to Pluto and discuss this issue
My job is an important one-
Correcting the flaws of Heaven and Hell
Trials in purgatory
It can be draining
Working with the dead
Negotiating with God and Pluto
And it doesn’t look like
I will be promoted any time soon
Since these bosses will never retire
Numbers
The age of the old truck- 640,000 miles
The doctor’s back office contains 50,000 files
Earth’s resume indicates experience lasting 4 billion years
The lake in my backyard consists of my millions of tears
The child of a cloud sleeps in a crib that covers the sky
Thousands of dust particles blind your tiny eye
Searching for at least 200 truths out of your 400 lies
One soft snow woman amongst 10,000 ugly guys
80 Gods search through infinite amounts of souls
Sifting through the angels and the trolls
Hoping to find the 10 that fit the mold
Heaven prototypes worthy of entering the land of gold
Hurricane Abortion
Poking a hole through the eye of the hurricane
Aborts it
Sadly, he has died
But happily, the houses live
New Jersey Sleet
Sweet sound of violins from the jukebox
That is nestled in your ear
Makes you cry every day
Makes you fear the greatest fear
Of falling in love with anyone anywhere
At any moment
You flinch like a snake recoiling
You can’t unravel your heart
The same way you can unravel a giant ball of yarn
So you keep it tightly knit
And the goose bumps on your heart
spread to your words
which hit me like New Jersey sleet against a car
The only thing that can warm me now
is Newark’s shitty humid summer
But it’s still winter here
I can move to LA or
I can stay
And treat you like I would a ghost or goblin
scream and run away
Heart Attack Splash
Walking on the side of the image of the earth
Mini waves rushing back and forth
Married to the ocean
Heart attack splash
You’re like a buoy floating on waves
Despair washes over me
Married to the ocean
Heart attack splash
There’s a piece of glass
That cuts right through you
So sharp it can cut through
Mercury and Mars
Heart attack splash
First poem
As the ant
Travels
to the sugary food
Sniffs it
And takes a piece
then notifies
Fellow ants
Of the treasure
As they
Happily run to the sweetness
And crowd around
The Twix bar
Second poem
As you lie
Naked
In front of
Me in my bed
Sitting up
Breasts alert
Seducing
You reached
Toward me
Into the abyss
Of my own
Naked body
Third Poem
As the printer
Stops
And the red light
Blinks
The job is not done
Printer needs to be fed
Office clerk puts paper in
The tray
And the printer feels full
So burps
Out some excel spreadsheets
With the scent of colored ink
Sleep
Stained glass windows with God singing in the bass section
I hear him but do not listen.
Because listening and hearing are completely different.
You mostly just hear.
I might as well have been born a mime
Clown
But, I ask you to repeat what I say
And you do
So, you’re a tape recorder
Garage band track
But you do not mind these accusations
As we lie in the bed with our new bunny
Night-light
The small light portion is directly on your ear
I want to operate
On your ear
So you can not only hear
But listen!
I will connect the wires of the ear
to the brain
(The circuits are disconnected)
Unaware, you unplug yourself
And fade away
Turning to the side
Covered in black
Me, coffee eyed
Sheep missing
Star gazing on sticker ceiling
Piano playing in ear
Teeth chatter
Blanket snatcher!
This is RIDICULOUS!!
Happy perfect life for no reason
Distraught worthless life for no Reason!
No reason!
No reason!
No reason!
No cheese!
No ice cream!
Only H2O!
Old lettuce
Beans and pig intestine semi-phallic item
Walking to sink
Disturbing dungeon devils below
Stitching your eyes closed
Just stay that way
I’ve given up
Melatonin
Eyes falsely closed
Evolution
Vast airless
Windless
Grassless
Cloudless
Strips of land
Antimatter pervades the new world of technology.
We humans are dust on the gadgets now.
We have no control as we watch over the mechanisms.
A robotic bee pollinated the fake flower with its fragrant perfume (which is also constructed)
And now the world can eat.
The computers are humming to each other a song of patriotism.
The grass is made of paper,
the world a video game that can’t be won.
A little mechanical hummingbird has fluttered by in the fluorescent beamed sky.
The Orange Tree
Unpickable orange stubbornly stuck to the tree.
It won’t budge no matter how much I try!
Sometimes there is no meaning behind things.
We might as well listen to lies.
If we keep searching for false truth we will never just be,
This unpickable orange is still stuck on this tree!
Classroom
The class feels heavy
As the droll professor mumbles on and on
Aimless chatter
About famous fairy tales
While I look toward the window and out
The cloudy sky,
Covers the star of contentment
(He keeps chattering)
The room opens underneath us
(I took some happy pills before this class)
A sparkly lake rests under the floor
Boats with oars float on its surface
Twelve of us climb inside and sail for the rest of the hour
Headed towards a magnificent castle
As the discussions of literature above fade
Poem
Floating in quicksand
Sinking in space
I see your face
Cold as a penguin’s march
Sad as a penguin’s baby
Crawling in Heaven
Searching
For my lost blue heart
Trying to find what tore us apart
Like a knife on flesh
As precarious as a snake of Medusa’s head
Wishing you were dead
Children’s Poem
The little boy awoke dollarless
His front right tooth remained
In its little pouch
Under his pillow
But his front left tooth was missing
And he noticed
fairy dust on the tooth to its left
A fairy that steals
Is no fairy at all
And it just so happened
That it was Christmas Eve
On this toothless evening
The boy ran downstairs
There was one single wrapped
gift
under the tree
And nearby,
Drops of blood………….
……………………………………….
Santa’s blood
Who appeared
To have
hit his
head
on the brick
of the fireplace
on the way down
the chimney
The boy called 911
“Santa hit his head”
But when they arrived
Santa was already dead
On the couch
Reality is covered with a cloth
Bitten by wish mites
Fantasy creeps into its bloodstream
And reality metamorphasizes into a dream
As you grab the reigns of a flying dragon
and float to a space garden
with gargoyles reaching above from below
where giant walking beetles
kill elves in the snow
You’re a knight fighting for the princess
who sits in a golden carriage
as she is threatened by a witch
but you won’t get the girl
Cuz really…
you are only on the couch
playing a game
in a dusty apartment
off the 5 south
Love and Marriage Poem
I have traveled to an underwater pool in an underwater hotel
Where the only way into the hotel is by scuba diving.
I drank margaritas in my tree house room in Africa.
In Sweden, I stayed in the Ice Hotel and practically froze to death.
I have seen Paris’ Kube reminiscent of the pyramids of Louvre.
I have visited hotels located in the midst of a desert and spent time with gazelles.
I have traveled afar but I will tell you my worldly bit of knowledge-
All of these exotic places are nothing compared to being with you here in Motel 6
Off the New Jersey Turnpike
with bottles of Beringer Merlot and cheap vodka.
Rolling around on a dirty mattress and watching an 80’s television set
Making rose water baths in the motel’s lovely bathroom
washing ourselves with used sex rags
The slight slant of your Asian eyes
Yellow flesh blanketed in white cream body
When you touch me with your one finger
I become unsteady and tremble
Like a blind tightrope walker
or a legless trapeze acrobat
But as you continue,
A safety net captures my body
I’m renewed, like breaking free from a thousand year coma
A pathway in my head is built
I travel down it with you
Caressing each other as we enter
New doors of new centuries
With young ageless faces
We travel to a future land of giant giants
That bears midget children
Dancing flowers
Computerized people
They are walking OLED’s
As they sit home and transport their bodies to the stores
I was meant to travel even in my death
And I was meant to travel with you from pre-birth
To Post-death
To after my afterlife
Until death of the afterlife do us part.
Forever and ever.
Amen.
Ghazal
Puffy clouds in your glass of wine
Are staring at you
The fog plumed through gunshot holes in the train windows like clouds run through fields
Love is to open sky as loathing is to death basket
Peanut butter is like muscles stretched taut over bone
Trapped in a yellow bubble that can’t pop
Mini flying horses sit on your hand
And then fly into the window crashing
Smoking flowers trying to get high
As you cultivate a weed garden for your front landscape
Best friend shrunken, sits in your ear all day making you laugh
Wearing cobwebs on the fashion runway, naked parts peeping
Smoking Weed
Tiny intelligent hands
Lighting the bong with a lighter.
Inside the Land of Oz on the poppy field
Emerald city blaring
Dark Side of the Moon
from Oz’s stereo.
“Do you think we’re being too cliché right now doing this?”
She answers, “Doing what?”
Your chatter
Blasphemous barrage of babble
Bothersome litany of ludicrous letters
Combined to form words
Words become sentences
Sentences become paragraphs and paragraphs
Become your speech
You discuss topics of terror but your timing is ill
I’m tired
And don’t care for the
Constant Cacophony of your running
Motor Mouth. Maybe
Tell someone else your tall tales of “truth”
To someone who
Believes blatant bluffing
Poem
Fear not the painted child
Who wanders in the dark
The wandering eye spots her
Targets, then kills her like a nark
She splatters to the ground in varying colors
Which wets the streets, slippery butter
The girl is gone because of an evil man
But, the colors of the street begin to paint a beckoning hand
That claws at the man and pulls him below
Under the streets in tunnels to live like a mole
Tip
Do not emulate yourself after those you see
Cursing and messing up their lives on reality T.V.
Paris Hilton
O, Paris Hilton, why must thou wail?
Ah, because thou art too pretty to be sent to jail!
The subway
The constellation
of the underground city
The subway
Where
Starving artists live
Bohemian poets write and chatter
The middle class roam
The cardboard box people shiver
Dirt and grime
Crud and crime
Hustle and bustle
The beauty of it all
Is the connection of people to people
In their aloof disconnected way.
No hi’s or goodbyes
But an awareness of ones
Sharing the ride
Heading in the same direction
With the same driver
And what matters most is
If we let the poor elderly woman take our seat while we stand
Grabbing hold of the silver pole
Anticipating bumps and stops along the way
Lies
Pack your lies in a suitcase and put them in the overhead compartment of your secrets
Then stuff your emotions into your heart
And don’t let the cotton come out of your mouth
You’re suffering with the dirt filled truffle of truth
Pour glaciers on the lava of your troubles
Crawl out of the grave alive and lay in crayoned grass with
The diorama of a sun
Blaring in your icicle eyes
Sucking hard candy words
Of reality
Melting on your tongue
Taking out the garbage of your self esteem
And raising it
Like Elvis from the dead
Lipstick kisses stain your underwear
Underneath, is the ultimate liar
You are dating him but want her
In your eyes, the world is a non-applauding audience
But if you open the door, acceptance will stumble into your closed closet.
The Butterfly Song
I have a fascination with butterflies
How they conform, transform, and metamorphasize
From mere insects to extraordinary creatures of flight
From a ghastly appearance to a beautiful sight
So transitory and so quick to die
They begin by crawling and then they can fly
They have two kinds of bodies in one life
They go through all this pain and strife
To become what they were always meant to be
Happy, unwrapped, and free
Fired
Getting fired is as worrisome as a broken parachute
or a trapeze net with a hole
or a snapped bungee cord
A piñata breaks open as your letters of reference from employers
Spill
Potential power players grab them and rip them to pieces. Too bitter and tainted with past mistakes for their taste.
Your chances fade like a movie scene
As you dive into a black hole
Saving yourself from the consistent staring of screens in the land of cubicles
Reality with Intermittent Dream Thoughts
I am eating a very bad cheese sandwich at Starbucks while reading about Spears’s latest meltdown.
(You invited me to an island of whiskey rivers)
I’m bored of reading Bukowski’s dwells and sick of trying to figure out Frost.
You’re drinking honey water and reading Asian comics.
(A walking mushroom crawled on my lap and asked me where rainbows end)
I’m waiting for you to finish reading so we can leave and watch Desperate Housewives.
How often is it that nearly everyone in a neighborhood gets murdered?
(Neon cabinets light up the kitchen as I clean up the angel food cake batter on the floor)
We’re watching Cashback at home now.
The boy can stop time.
It’s similar to that 80’s sitcom with the alien father.
(I spoke to an alien and he said that they get six weeks vacation in his world)
I really don’t know where I am or what I’m doing anymore and my life is like that movie where the cartoon stuff is super-imposed on real people.
That film technique really freaks me out.
Waking Life is the name of the movie.
Yea, I’m riding on boats in the street
Story of a Psychologist
I sit here all day talking to crazy people.
A woman who sniffs dogs on the street for fun.
A client who screams profanities at work and keeps getting fired.
I have a patient who masquerades as an Irish nurse and fools everyone. (She doesn’t have a nursing degree yet somehow managed to connive her way into a nursing position at a hospital.)
I get so tired of their antics- their schizophrenic threats of murder (There’s no one there, damn it!)
Sometimes, I drink half a bottle of brandy during sessions to calm my nerves.
My last client, Patty, had 15 different personalities.
A few of them were musicians and one of them would only sing in recitative during our sessions.
She’s down to two personalities now.
For a while she would show up in cowboy outfits one day and prom dresses the next.
I do have a gift for helping these poor doomed souls, but like I said, it tires my brain.
I go home to my manic depressive wife who lays in bed all day sometimes hallucinating, “Bob! A penny with feet crawled onto my shoulder and asked me where to find a pot of gold!”
Most of the time she just lies there eating chocolates and watching soap operas. Intermittently, she plays the piano. Sometimes she will weep for eight hours straight and other times laugh uncontrollably. There are also the occasional pill popping suicide attempts that always end up with her long hibernation for a few days. I don’t take it too seriously.
I head home after a long night’s work and find my eight-year-old (normal) son playing video games. I put him to bed, tuck him in, and begin my ritual abuse.
I fondle him (and other things).
I guess he is going to need a therapist.
It’s fortunate that I have good referrals
In my circle of colleagues.
Hey, at least I’m not a priest cheating on Jesus!
Jail
Bungee jumping from Heaven
Into a brush fire that sweeps the Earth
I hear laughter through Purgatory’s walls
Solitary confinement
Until a decision has been made
Rusty walls, foliage free box
All I can do is
Contemplate the past
My mistakes, formidable desire
Leading to an uncouth fate
Restless,
TV-Less,
Foodless
Hopeless
Schizophrenic God in my ear
The Guillotine is waiting
If the Jury says so
A brilliant con- artist would prevent this
So I devise a plan
As intricate as one of Bach’s fugues
Fleeing murder from murder soul
I’ve always been the brilliant One
In Trouble
With the Government
Once I escape
I promise I will change
It’s time
My friend the Pre-Med student
You’re like a plant cell with its impenetrable cell wall.
But I’m the fluid animal cell with the permeable plasma membrane
that lets you float around inside near my nucleus
I’ve only touched your mitochondria
It shocked me with its power
Do I have to take you on platinum chariot rides?
Do I have to write you a great oratorio of love?
Do I have to wait by your diamond-coated window and play you a desperate love song on the harpsichord?
Do I have to pluck strings from my harp and construct a bigger and better harp with old strings?
It’s impossible.
And I can’t take all your pre-med crap
Yes, yes we know you will be a prestigious doctor
But, my the time you are,
I will be eating Asphodel every day
Thinking of you
Poem
Remnants of Kung Pao chicken
In the kitchen
Wish I had a cheeseburger and fries
For an earlier demise
Dating a doll
I had this girlfriend who
only talked to me through her doll
And the relationship was quite weird
Since I was always speaking to this doll
And when we went to dinner
The doll came
We sat there eating Dim sum
The doll and I chatting as usual
I looked at my girlfriend with her pleasant mostly closed lips
Her talking belly
And then I spoke to her sweetly
with mouth wide open (ventriloquist’s nightmare)
And Sally (the stupid doll)
Moved mechanically towards me for a kiss
And wood painted red became what I knew as my
girlfriend’s lips
Table of Contents
Pastel trees in charcoal eyes
1
Nighttime strategies for spontaneous lust
7
Windshield with bird shit
8
Wind up canaries migrating west
82
Anecdote for lovesickness
87
Index 102
I believe
I believe in a special place that we won’t call Heaven this time
I believe it is warm like a cottage with a lit fireplace
I believe everyone is welcome from Christians to Scientologists
I believe there is an easy way to get accepted without any long applications or red tape.
And the receptionist is beautiful and kind
I believe we all look ageless and are immortal forms that have no description.
I believe we:
Float
Fly
Hop
Jump
Walk
Drive
Cry
Smile
Wink
Blink
Play
music
I believe we write there every day and no one looks over our shoulder
I believe we are never bored and our responsibilities will wane
I believe we have our memories erased and start anew
I believe we do things we couldn’t do before
I believe I hear the Recruiter of this place knocking on my Hospital’s door
I believe that Earth is not the place for this body anymore
Abortion
A purple fetus
With a thousand legs
Sits in her overgrown belly
That extends for miles
Kicking all day
A thunderbolt through her body
She must rid of it
But God said not to
These extenuating circumstances must suffice!
He still says no
And now all that’s left are ashes
Of a beautiful woman
And a
potential
person
Space Shop
I want to sell space dust
And cosmic glue
And open up a space shop
I want to find bits of galaxies
And put them in crystal balls
Where we can view future civilizations
I want to sell Time perfume in little bottles
And asteroid lamps
I want to sell universe models that expand and collapse.
I will make the antithesis of Gravity- anti gravity.
People can use it to float to the clouds when they fall.
I want to sell Hours to add on to the day for people who are too busy.
I want you to co-own the shop with me
Because all of this silly space stuff doesn’t really matter.
If you say yes, we can even sell anti-matter.
But if you say no,
Then I just want to be with you
And we can go back to your idea
Of co-owning a skateboard shop instead.
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