Trailing

Mythological D-I-D; or Damsel-In-Distress
Gonna lay down and die now,
With no one left to impress?
Fuck that, she’s an Empress
Bleeding irrational smile
And triumph: Greco-Roman style
More to her tragic power
Than to get in bed and un - dress

Spitting in the face of the Gods
She became The Receiver
Of men who clung to her ruby ridges
Like the blood of Randy Weaver
And they would feed her
For a time, for the walk to the river
To the verge of sublime
Where there’s pain and there’s madness
Left to lay on her tables:
With those nickels and dimes

She’s blessed
With a red sugar heart
Underneath her soft breasts
More or less
Entreating her pleasures
And the copious stress
As wide as a mile
And full of tiny bird’s nests

Room enough for him
With the rest of humanity
Cracks in the side-walk:
The slow erosion of sanity
Behind the velvet rope
The human tribute to Vanity
And just to your left
Her little four-star calamity

She’s got nothing to lose
He was standing beside
He would strip her of her panties
Her dignity
And her animal hide
No question remains
No decision left to decide
Choice and Commitment
Calm thoughts of suicide
A masochistic urge
She will no longer abide
Ashes in their urn
A bright cigarette burn
And FINALLY
Shoving all curtains aside:
She’s passes through cosmic doorway
Baby,
Watch her hit it high

Dear Motherfuckers; Don't touch my laundry.

The light is gleaming on your car across the street
It is like John the Baptist in forest green
With wheels, no parking permits
It shines with the modest righteousness of an
In-animate
Object
Let it radiate before me so that I might remember innocence
And hopelessness and martyrdom
In the things that do surround me
Symbols of
And allusions to:
Things
Besides my personal relationship
With you

Of the non-Catholic sinners
With their dressed-up
Insecurity
I know we make you blush with the frankness of our language
And our pettiness
Our alienating conversations
Glistening rock-hard ovaries
Clashing
The partygoers, full on
And not a thing to celebrate:
A beautiful/disgusting perpetual motion machine
All bending like so many willows
To serve all needs, and take complaints
With grace and gritted teeth
So un-modestly chained to our addictions
Reading your reactions classified
I easily place your varied revulsions
My eyes attracted to “Garage Sales”
I lose focus,
Changing the subject

I remember, at the time
I hated not waking up together
It so depressed me when he slept
Like a teen-aged drunk driving causality
Desiring so much to see the dawn together
And being raised
To wake in time for a rural school-bus
I would let my naked body meet the morning
With an embrace, while you
Were dead
To me, and everything
‘til noon
It almost ended our relationship
What a joke
We came to live through wars together
Now I think:
I’m so grateful you gave me time to write

Hurricanes and how to pray about them

When asking God for a favor,
it’s best to start small.
“Please, almighty God, don’t shatter my windows.”
Don’t get ahead of yourself.
Think about the storm
and all the demon winds
and know that it’s all part
of a grand plan.
“Gracious God, let cars not
fly through the side of my house.”
God is listening, so
kindly ask for minor floods
and quick dissipation
once the storm hits land.

Pray about the hurricane,
not against, it would be wrong
to defy God’s will.
“Humbly, lord, this house
is all we have.”

Crouch up in the smallest ball you can muster
and rock back and forth at the lowest point of your house.
Feel the foundation tremble
at God’s immeasurable strength.
Cry at the sound of dogs Toto-ing into the stratosphere.
Say the lord’s name, the one you know, three times
and click your heels to the rhythm.
Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain. Grovel
and beg, plead and cry more.
God is listening, so
board up your windows if you
plan to use the name in vain.

Dear Abby

This morning I pose the question: Is there any way to change the wicked beast?

- Chief Starblanket (At Wounded Wrist)

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Dear C* @ W2;

If it was born and stayed beautiful for the first quarter of its life, you can be sure there is no way to change it. It will never gain awareness of its nature, and will see the destruction and violence it does as being a mere side effect of its existence. Rarely there are monsters born of lycanthropy, bitten at some long withheld future date, a few thousand days away from birth. There is a change that comes in some kind of post-adolescent maturity, a ripeness, so that they are beautiful for the first time in their lives.

I have intuited that these cases, though rare, might be of great interest to you. I can tell you exactly that if you are writing to me in the first place, that this is not an ordinary beast, born and reared by the instincts of the perfect few. Of those gorgeous creatures it is known, even by laymen and idiots, that the immutability I have referenced in the above paragraph is as stalwart as the chemical elements. I do not blame them for this, for wolves are born to feast on flesh and blood, as they are born to sate themselves on soulless favors for all of time, amen. Predators cannot be dissuaded, but in their guiles men have died trying, exhausting every card trick and knock-knock joke they ever knew.

Forgetting all that; this is not the kind you have before you, still the threat upon your life is no less immanent. I can tell you right now that this is not the time for outlandish attempts at time management and vague retreats into holistic stress therapy! Listen to me closely because if you remain in such proximity to this narcissistic abomination your day of reckoning is nothing less than nigh:

Set aside your foolish affection for this one I know you have grown so close to, because I also know, that as you wrote me this, there is still time to cut your pink leather leash. The house pet that you harbor has been growing steadily more beautiful, and you have noticed this. All their young-adulthood has been accumulating towards every glittering new moment in which they are recognized as what they are; slowly undressing in a striptease of true nature. Killers. Better than most at maintaining both consciousness and memory of their former inert states, they are more reprehensible for their unrelenting selfishness and cruelty. They will rend you so completely in their hands, and crush all the intangible human softnesses that you possess. It is the beauty that keeps you in these mighty palms. Turn your face away from the light, turn your face away.

I will end with a self-authored proverb hoping eternally that you have gotten the gist:

There can be found no trace of ill-intentions on the bloody fingertips of the Giant who enquired to caress the gosling.

I hope this has been helpful,

-D.A.

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$$$ NOTE $$$

At long last I have kicked off my Art/Poetry Blog project, which consolidates my contributions to branches and contains some new written work and shoddy photographs of my visual art endeavours which will be exclusive to:


www.holy-almost.blogspot.com

Dig it!

P.S. Thank you to Branches as an entity and all contributing memebers for continuing to be a source of inspiration for me.

Co-dependant African Blue Mantra

It is the hour before
The hour before work
Every minute is golden accumulation
Against the shower curtain
That I will draw on this private morning in my apartment
Which will end once I am in the alley way
Taking three or four last desperate inhalations
Against the restaurant’s brick wall

Trying to look forward to the money:

I praise whatever somber mystic power permits the Greeks
To keep both of their two clocks
Running ten minutes slow
A double blessing
Needed to counter the two human manifestations
Of ill feeling who have just moved in next door to me

Twin specters of death
The color of an anti-matter black
African women
Sisters, or friends
Walking the neighborhood streets all day
Relentless
Collecting plastic shopping bags
Completely full
Of other people’s garbage
They never fail to stare at me
Not speaking a word
Only gesturing malignantly
Sometimes they hiss
Like rotten sickly cats
And a vuvuzela in the local pub
The Mother continent
Having an infectious touch
All around Saskatchewan
I’m afflicted

This latest addition beautifully complimenting
My other already welll established infections
I am flourishing in a new
More assertive kind of madness
It is a hard drinking
All possessing
Omnipotent and magnifying
Force lingering behind
Every kind of feeling that I feel
From now on
And he the disembodied
Unnamed figure
Now starring in all my nightly dreams
And hallucinated picture perfect
In a recent fever
That has forced me to cast something out
Relinquish all my blind intoxication
For ten days, while I take the medication
The perfect excuse
I will challenge my own will
On the back step
The cruel nature of perfection
Forces me to up the ante

Some say red hair is unlucky
I read in a book of proverbs that:
“Ill-luck is good for something.”
I have fully thrown myself into the discovery of all it’s uses
All parts of the animal
Sweet stench of the avid lovers’ bed
Endless ways to entertain with perfect courtesy
And the best card tricks
You’ve ever seen
The way he is the highlight
To the way I lose my head
I inflict a bodily revenge
Let him be lost on my island,
Wrecked in my shapely ruin
Looking for fruit in unknown forest
You're the free man
Because tonight, it's on the house