“Sex-toy Arms Race”

I was hoping it to be the name of my next collection. If I had one. I remember once I asked my cousin if he wanted me to read some of my poems to him. “Hell no!” he said. I praised him on his aesthetic sensibilities. In this range of tough cowboys, I’m a wimpy poet. Coddled, poached, scrambled and fried. I’m a bag of mixed nuts! Running around with tape and an I.V. needle sticking out of my arm, dripping blood.

Poker playing dogs, velvet Elvis-es, soy hot dogs – my life is a disheveled Nolte. Feel awful falafals. Gay cowboys, transgender lesbians, tits on a boar – what’s life coming to? I was watching a Lon Chaney silent the other day and in the end Lon’s redeemed nefarious character gets shot and as his lady swoons over him dying Lon silent movie subtitle says: “Don’t grieve, death interests me.” Next to that cool cat Barron Trump, Lon has got to be, pound for pound, kilo for kilo, peck for pecker, cooler that Tony the Tiger! I had a casual uncaring sex relationship with a woman once – yeah a woman – a real one not a blow up or female sacred cow, and this braying mammal would crack up when ever she heard the word “pecker”. I guess it’s like a chicken head pecking as it fills with blood, pecking. I wonder how people speak of turkey in Turkey. On Thanksgiving in 2015 I woke up checked the internet headlines and one said “Russia Forgives Turkey”. Gee, I thought, the bird gets around. And has friends in drunk places. I always wonder about food shortages in Hungary too. Are they getting enough to eat over there? More paprika? My hippie, a humble hippie at that, had an idea for the US air force or Air Force, should practice bombing bombing Ethiopians with food. This was in the early eighties. Then folks forgot to use interruptus and a whole new generation of Soylent Green was born. Moral of the story: hippie grew up stayed the same but an open system got too full or the weed quality declined – no more Gold – he bought a Bobcat but nevertheless he did have a cheap suit that just hung there. Bored and lonely, waiting for him to come home all dirty, and strip, and still not put him on! But at funerals, boy did that cheap suit shine! Goes to show an ill-fitting garment is better than unplucked chicken! Hog jowls, Ren liked them. Hog jowls are a metaphor. Pigs ears a simile.

A shout out to Ron Androlla. I just found the two chapbooks he sent the home Beatnik office in the pile. I have commenced reading this finest of men’s works and loving them! And oops, I forgot to put Ron on the subscriber list after I cashed his twenty-five dollar check! And we Cowgirls did not send him the purple (in honor of the dead Prince) copy of the first best of Beatnik Cowboy mega extravaganza! So he gets two copies of the next Executive decision whenever we scrape up enough coin to give birth to the aborted baby. Coat-hanger and all. Ooh, should I have said that? First choice is best choice, Kerouac says, unless of course you’re dyslexic. Dyslexics untie!! Create a common befuddled font! When I was young and reading the classics, like me tackling “The Brothers Karamazov” I used to call what I did “looking at words on paper” and turning pages, devoid of any understanding whatsoever. Hours I spent looking at the words and turning pages. Missing entire plots of Hemingway kith and kin. Joyce was right up my alley – like Gertrude Stein nobody’s supposed to understand that are they. I got a charitable D in American literature, way too stoned to read Toby Dick in three months or three years instead of the three days the bow-tied Van Dyke’d guy decreed we read it in. I didn’t even make it out of the forward and introduction in three days. I did, however, discover on my own that Bartley was a Scrivener or something like that. I was not proud, I was young, horny with whitehead painful zits. And I popped them, shooting pus streams all over the mirror. A mirror I never cleaned along with my uber dirty glasses lens. Oh youth! O’Pioneers and Willa Catheter. The self lubing pocket catheter. Sounds sexy.

But hey! These poems, like everybody it seems, words escape me. That’s why we let others write them and then post them. They are, to put it mildly, great. They demand attention. Like Ron’s poems, and Chris’s, not mine. I learned from the humble hippy. Now let me go worship myself as God and a cruel Allah incarnate, and the Buddha’s little brother, and Zoroaster’s sister and Jain’s Addiction. Oye. Send in blathering of depth, scope, and socially hindered cultural lag genius. Thank you/Spaseba.

1/31/2017