he is (almost) risen

 

you can hear the chickens clucking

from inside the fresh slaughterhouse

 

and the people outside waiting are so calm

playing on cell phones and smoking cigarettes in line

 

the day before easter on a frigid april morning

 

i don’t know how this works

do they just go inside and pick out a chicken

send it off to the sacrifice?

 

i hate my shitty grocery store

but walking to work this morning

i feel a soft fondness for it

 

the chickens there are already dead and cut and quartered

taking all of the murder out of the meal for me

 

a block away i can still hear the chickens

only faintly underneath the sound of christian music

playing out inside the compound of

an emergency food pantry

 

there is a long line of people waiting there as well

 

a little less cell phone playing

a lot more cigarette smoking

 

the benevolent church ministers are walking

up and down the line

getting information from the people

and passing out pamphlets

 

reassuring them that they don’t have to attend services

in order to get some food

 

god loves each and all of us one and the same, they say

 

even the guy sleeping underneath his shopping cart

between the enterprise rent-a-car and the honda dealership

 

he will be risen!

one of the ministers shouts to the crowd

only no one claps or cheers

 

and on cue the christian music rises to a crescendo

covering the sounds of the chickens and the people

 

jesus christ with his dull perpetual life of holy servitude

as the rest of us live this way and that

 

driving fancy cars off of lots

walking to work or standing in long lines

with starving bellies

 

spending our single short lives in cages

in awe or disgust of that tired crucifixion

 

apathetic to the whole bloody mess

 

but always certain that the slaughter will come

and round out the blank spaces of another year.

 

 

a most elegant man

 

a most elegant man is walking behind me

on this cold-as-hell winter morning

 

he’s got a little snow cap with ear flaps

a thin scarf and a big red beard

 

he’s keeping pace so that he’s right up my ass

and when i stop on the street, he stops

 

in new york city this is grounds to commit a murder

 

but it’s maybe five degrees outside

the wind off the estuary making it worse

 

i’m carrying ten bags of groceries

five in each hand

and i forgot my goddamned gloves

 

my fingers look like strands of red pulp

so i couldn’t strangle this man if i wanted to

 

the guy behind me, he’s got one little bag

and his cell phone

 

i wish he’d kick it into gear

just pass me or something

 

when i stop to let him go

he stops to check something on his phone

 

the wind goes through me like i’m made

of plastic grocery bags

 

i look back and say, hey, buddy, what the fuck?

but he’s got his earbuds in

 

i start up again

he starts up again

 

i can see the apartment building

but it still feels a million miles away

with the wind and this asshole keeping pace

 

when i get to the door

it makes sense that he lives in the building too

 

six floors of strangers

living petty little lives

 

i put the five bags from the one hand in the other

struggle to get out my keys

 

while the most elegant man waits patiently

for me to unlock the door

 

i even hold it for him

 

ten bags and swollen red hands

a smile on my face and murder in my eyes

 

as the most elegant man passes me

 

with nary a head nod

or a discreet thank you to boot.

 

 

alcoholics anonymous blues

 

knee deep

into my fourth vodka

 

i think about the man

this afternoon

 

whom i gave

the alcoholics anonymous

pamphlets to

 

wonder what he’s doing tonight

to kill the pain

 

shake the ice cubes in my glass

before killing the dream in one gulp

 

then rise for a fifth

 

as beethoven shits out

another masterpiece

on the old static radio.

 

THE ICE CUBE AND THE MATCH

From the ice cube’s perspective

the match lights so fast and so often

it might as well be the eternal flame

from some house of worship.

But seriously, to the ice cube,

the match has a curiously single-minded purpose-

all it seems to want to do is get lit and unlit.

From the match’s perspective

the ice cube is always cold to the touch

and takes too long to melt

so the match is content to sear the ice cube

and allow itself to be extinguished

without worrying about the ice cube’s burn rate.

 

The March of the Emperor Penguins

By Michael Lee Johnson

 

Emperor Penguins never set feet on land,

straight up their feet on ice, tuxedo’s with short feathers

overlapped, waterproofed, inner down layers insulated with air.

Heads bobble fat fannies waddle, the march to the homeland begins.

70 miles the clan walks and slides away from the sea and back to the sea.

70 miles into the darkest, driest and coldest continent, Antarctica cradles up the South Pole.

High step, searching for partners for one year, away from predators, the mating party begins.

Mutual sex they turn check format a goal, breed their young, months of illness, hurt, struggles, isolation, separation face in the winter the great white ghost of death.

Starvation is a 2-way trip the male is the mother 120 days, mother goes for food-

at one point tough they all must go back to the ocean and sea.

Emperor Penguins they dance and huddle.

Back they go to the ice, to the flow, and sea 50/50, millions of years ago.

 

morning after

 

the summer

solstice

the sky

is a bullet

from a

blue gun

and all

hopes for

the new

year are

buried in

mud and slush

 

I’m trying

to change

the tire

on this

life I

drive 100

miles an hour

wiping  sweat

off my

game face

thinking its

time to

re commit

 

to God

or work

say Buddhist

prayers practice

TM join a gym

attend a

meeting or

something

 

or else  its

time to sign

that suicide

pact you wrote

back when

you never

thought you’d

be this sad

this tired

this broken

or this old.

 

 

PTSD therapy

 

after all

these years

I’m still

pulling

the skin

off my

nightmares

still biting

my nails

till they

bleed still

putting on

the uniform

no matter

how many

times I

try to

bury it

my therapist

says I

can tell

her anything

but I’m

still afraid

and don’t

know how

to explain

the blinking

lights in

the eyes

of ghosts

or the

sound of

an infants

last breath.

 

 

morning after

 

the summer

solstice

the sky

is a bullet

from a

blue gun

and all

hopes for

the new

year are

buried in

mud and slush

 

I’m trying

to change

the tire

on this

life I

drive 100

miles an hour

wiping  sweat

off my

game face

thinking its

time to

re commit

 

to God

or work

say Buddhist

prayers practice

TM join a gym

attend a

meeting or

something

 

or else  its

time to sign

that suicide

pact you wrote

back when

you never

thought you’d

be this sad

this tired

this broken

or this old.

 

 

PTSD therapy

 

after all

these years

I’m still

pulling

the skin

off my

nightmares

still biting

my nails

till they

bleed still

putting on

the uniform

no matter

how many

times I

try to

bury it

my therapist

says I

can tell

her anything

but I’m

still afraid

and don’t

know how

to explain

the blinking

lights in

the eyes

of ghosts

or the

sound of

an infants

last breath.

 

 

“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

we need more books of the dead

what happens to the soul
when the body goes kaput?

does sit atop a mountain
contemplating the Tao?

does it go to the Western Paradise
to sit at the foot of Amida?

or does it wander in some distant woods
where it’s always sunny and breezy?

the only thing to offer the hungry
is food

and the only thing to offer the sick
is prayers

so I say Kwan Yin of the gentle hands …
and throw it to the eight winds of heaven.

Atmospheric Pressure

I feel the pressure

to keep quiet,

dumb down,

get on my knees

and ask forgiveness

for the sin of being born.

No one tells me this,

but it’s in the air.

Maybe it has something

to do with climate change

or collective fear,

in the atmosphere.

Maybe it’s some deep

primordial inclination,

some self-sabotage

imbedded in my DNA

that foments public insecurity

and makes me want to choke

down a dead dictionary,

crawl under a rock,

and tell myself to

shut the fuck up and die!

Emasculated Society

I walk through

this desiccated

vagina of life

protected by

a diaphragm

me and my

skinny jeans

Leaving down

the toilet seat

everywhere I

take a piss

Holding doors

for the ladies

and holding

my farts in

Oftentimes

I’m victimized

like a lifetime

network movie

the only difference is

it’s vice versa

society laughs

when that happens

I’m watching

everything I say

avoiding all things

considered misogynistic

there’s no other way

so naturally I’m

voting democratic

An avid supporter

of their rights

if they choose

to shave their heads

but refuse

to shave their legs

no problem

it’s their prerogative

death to the king baby

I’ve been dethroned

Losing my balls

in this feminine society

is one thing

we’ve had to part

after all these years

of male dominance

it was a long time

now look who’s not

coming

But I still have

this disgusting

thing called a prick

if I thrust like the man

I once was

I could be granted

a permission slip

to leave the confines

of this candle lit home

up from my man cave

in compliance with the queen