Willie Smith

I love – after an out-of-Budweiser
experience – boxing with my shadow;
beside myself with cyber lust,
floating above the smoke,
drowning, none-the-wiser,
in some excess of mirrors,
summoning ecstatic static,
trapped in syllogism extremism,
receiving over the logic gates a
bill for what proves to be –
converted to bits –
the same old jism.
I, above this hymn, hum –
a bee thick with pollen,
hovering the rose,
praying knee-deep in nectar
punch drunk to be.

Turned on the TV,
and the TV turned on me.
A dog on the screen appeared. I
sneered at how stupid the dog appeared.
Barked, “Jump, Rover – Jump!”
And the dog did, jumped clear out of the TV;
turned on me, how Sodom turned on God;
and you know Sodom turned God on,
all that bored-out butt getting stuffed.
Enough to turn God’s Rod into a sly snake.
The mutt onto my Levi cuff glommed,
the day turning into a circus.
With a fist, I cuffed the beast.
Grabbed a stick and beat the dog off.
Let him lick up the mess. Chased him
back inside the tube. Where he turned
out to be the locomotive for an ad for
Gravy Train. Turned the TV off,
and the TV turned off all three rings of me – left
on the floor, in the den, bored to death; shot
to hell one more doggone godawful afternoon.

One of those days when I can’t decide
how many humps in an m, the number
of ans in banana, how Achilles
could ever overtake the tortoise, Death
and I go walking. Arm-in-arm, he with
his disarming smile, filling my ear with
foreboding and despair. Would I like to,
would I care to, step around into the shade
to share a drop of something cool and
not-so-sweet? After quaffing, after quenching,
after swapping tales of lying and of wenching,
he a bony forefinger raises:
“Now’s the time to discuss,” he hisses,
“succumbing to after-life-lust.” My jaw
drops. Lightning fractures the air.
Death with a rusty can my mouth waters.
The mind a garden of rot and food for no thought.

After dark, the people from
under the bridge come out,
searching under streetlights,
up and down the concrete,
for a better outcome. They gather in clots,
yakking, muttering, hoarse whispering,
bleeding off the stress of another day spent
penniless, half-asleep, mindlessly tonight awake.
Contemplate their own species getting off late,
hustling to a stop, hailing a cab, hurrying
key-in-fist to the parking lot. Only due to the
purity of their apathy do the people not hunt
these pelts and skins in fine clothing,
rolling along the street, eyes full of loathsome fear.
Till one of their number, crazier than some,
wails to a banker, or a flunky, monkey or mouthpiece thereof:
“Let’s you and me in the back of my Escalade tonight get laid!”
And the heads of the homed at the concrete sink,
a gust of disgust in their cheeks.
“Plus, you won’t do what I just said,
guess I’m better off fucking dead!”
The people in the audience, where once a future sat,
smirk to themselves at those who from the lyric slink.
Hey, the people think: these be the creeps missing a link.
While for a song on both sides thought
dies with the echo, in the alley, of a song.

Leaves skitter across the concrete –
Hamlet at the skull poking fun,
acting oh-so very discreet.
Hurray, I’m 69 – sidewise Cancer – everyone!
Although I’m in fact a Scorpio-Libra cusp.
Meaning I’ll die unbalanced, crazed with lust.
So – who gives a tinker’s curse?
For me they are already warming up the hearse.

How to word thought
without deliberate thought;
deliberately to deliver through word thought.
We dead, you see, although, of course,
you can’t, think not.
Tie instead our tie
in a Windsor not on the map.
Sword the Gordian from a corner
Descartes could never paint. Depress the tongue
to lace our shoe with air. Step on the gas,
cut the smoke; sever the link. Belt every
swinging loop through each vacuum. Shoo the owl
to save the shrew who in the moral becomes you.
Although, really, nothing becomes you; nothing so
shrewd as thought too fast for word. We dead
through eyeteeth star our cuffs to blow,
when out we jitter to take on the wind
to divvy our take on the wind,
howling how word thought. So
go and word a dream for the mirror to look thought.

Do I love you more
than dew in the
dawn sparkles?
Do webs irised
in the garden
twinkle less
than the smile I
catch in your
eye?

Yes and yes.
For our love
forever lives
in this breeze
so soon
in the heat of day
to still.

Crows pick at the rat
teenage dragsters last night
to the asphalt flattened.
Noisemakers breakfasting
on one less kitchen threat.
The bigger get the guts.
The smaller rip through fur.
A runt wrestles with the tail.
Only at the last moment,
when my foot falls less than a foot
from their feathers, do they scatter,
flapping to the curb on either side.

Continuing, after crossing, on the way
to the bus, the office, the cubicle,
at my back I hear, clockwork like,
them rejoin the feast,
pecking, snapping, tearing;
gargling at a fellow to hop back
from the gargler’s beak
in the gargler’s meat.
Rat bowel stink
through the rest of the
day’s restless turns
twists,

assuring me those Crows
who own the Maze
will likewise clean me –
at the end of the day –
sudden, senseless or otherwise
– up.

I rub together words
to get her to come.
First the smoke, then the ember.
Finally a flame remembers her name,
but refuses to tell,
till I spit on the light,
and out it hisses.
Anxious to grope ankles
to swing her inside the cave
to pull through my dream her hair,
rub together words
to get her
together with me to come.
Eager to flee my itch
I scratch but to
ratchet the itch up.

But will never come to scratch
the act of rubbing words together
to get her to come.

I poured a finger of scotch into a coffee cup
and ate the cup and licked up the spilled scotch
and ate the mouth of the fifth down to the neck and
was wolfing the table leg, when
mother came in to iron some bugs out
of her pocket calculator
and couldn’t help but notice the ruined fifth,
the cup nowhere and the table wobbly
on three legs. She threatened to knuckle down
and hand it to me,
but I trumped her rump,
tugged the table leg out of my throat
and clubbed her to death. Blood spattered
the venetian blinds and mother slumped
to the foot of the refrigerator.

I threw up a window and sat on a foot stool and
reswallowed the table leg
and munched on the arm of a chair
till I was stuffed, then jerked down the wallphone
and ate out the mouthpiece
and considered sucking the news off the tv,
but decided instead to put the mouth
of a firearm to my temple
and pray.