The Manly Thing to Do

Aw hell
I think I’m just
gonna pack
it all in
start taking
female growth
hormones
and live the
rest of my
life
as a lesbian
woman.

And There Was A Super Eight Across The Street!

Me going native
I remember I asked a hotel keeper
A Mexican lookin’ guy
In a Ma and Pa motel
In New Mexico
If he had clean rooms
He looked at me sideways
Like I was supremely uncouth
a real Bozo
Like I was thinkin’ the color
Of his skin
Made the room dirty.
“Yeah,” he said, coolly, and I feeling
foolish, feeling a racist,
I immediately took the
Room
No questions asked.
And goddammit it was dirty.

Haiku Time

Time,
Bottles of shampoo,
A clogged drain,
And a ravaged Judy Garland barely making it through the
performance
still belting out one hell of a show.
Through the Dryer Hole

He wore shaving cream,
about his genitals,
naked,
running screaming through
the streets
down to the bar.
Started Wounded Knee.
“Careful. He’s gonna puke!”
“He won’t puke.”
“He always pukes when he does shots.”
Pukes. Spurts a dollop. Arcs
majestically. Barfs copiously
into his hand.
Dam God.
Tells you it’s his name
spelled backward
Head through the dryer
hole, poking into the
laundry slash bathroom.
No dryer.
Laura, peeing.
Michelob bottle in
hand.
Head, just a head, grinning
bald head, poking through the
Dryer hole into the laundry
Slash bathroom,
“Heeerre’s Johnny!”
Laura, caught watching herself
drink beer in the mirror, sitting peeing,
Flings
the bottle.
Michelob bottle collides with
Bald head flesh poking into the
Laundry slash bathroom
through the dryer hole.
Johnny’s got a headache
and the girls down the
hall are stripping,
comparing breast and
nipple sizes, awaiting the
Next suicide.

Circa 1985, Vermilion, South Dakota, USA

Sheeple

I wanna join a cult!
And do cult things!
Like kill myself,
With fifty others,
Instead of doing it
Alone,
In the closet
Belt tied tightly around my neck,
Hanging from the same metal
Cylinder
As my clothes.

Cuz’ I Spoke No Russian

“With or without nucleus?”
the Soviet man
asked me
as he was helping me
buy my olives.

“Without,”
I said.
He translated
and the store-clerk
handed me a
can of the
“pitted”
atomic greens.

The Maintenance Man (formerly titled: “the Janitor”)

Knows less about stuff
that don’t mean nothin’

Stocking Stuffers

What’s black and white
and red all over?
Slaughtered interracial
orgy. (or slaughtered interracial couple).

Return

Watch the faces in the crowd,
Look at the explanation beyond the
Intonation
Know the need beneath desire,
when you break with tradition,
Tradition breaks you,
Deny the calm and
Serenity of God,
You see only hypocrisy,
Foolish restrictions,
Proscriptions,
Denying a fulfillment,
Repressing and killin
The spirit of man,
Leading a life of jazz,
Syringes, broken worlds, cigarettes,
Lenny Bruce and a comedy of
Breasts and ears and death
That winds a little finger
About a shooting star…

Human Rights

And remember if you ain’t getting
Jobs and peein’ in the boss’s coffee
For the first three days before the
Results of the urine test come in
And you get fired
You ain’t doin’ shit for human rights.

A Not So Fullness of Being

Humans
Will never
Stop making
Up
False Gods.

God made it
This way
And if the current
God ever
Were proven to
Not exist
Humans would
Create
Another one,
And if this
New God
Ever tried to
Show Herself
And walk the earth
Like Jesus
Did
Well, we’d kill
This new God
Too.

It’s like they said
In the
Bar down the
Hill from
Golgotha
The day after
Jesus
Was
Executed: “God sent
Jesus
Down to
See what
Earth was
Like;

And we gave him a taste of what
It’s like to be human.

Men With No

You either kill
Yourself or
Nature kills you,

Either way,
It’s kinda
Spooky,

Funny though,
When you feel
Like killing yourself
The thought of
Dying maybe isn’t
So bad:
I guess it’s only
Better to be sad
When you’re happy,

Cause when you’re happy
Man,
The fear of
Dying creeps in…

And sadness makes
Death
…more like a brother.

Dear Lord

Today,
may my eyes,
and the way I use them,
be beautiful.

Poem previously published by Yellow Chair Review No. 4

Hello dear readers. This is the first missive from the redoubtable Beatnik Cowboy. We have been hibernating, in the Northern Pure Land, attempting to tame our Monkey Minds, by holding up in separate bear caves, with separate bear family friends. Fleas be damned. As editors, you know, we attempt not to play Yahweh. But when we see, read, and fully hear what those writers submitting really don’t want us to hear, we dance as silly-assed farmers, round-up ready. And we publish. Toiling long, short bright-dark maudlin-flippant sad-happy hours, channeling Gutenberg; we do the strenuous work of discovery. Mining dirt, pay dirt. For the talented poetess, pay dirt is what poetic fame, recognition, and fan worship is. Typhus, is a disease of dirt, just ask Napoleon when the new ones come around. But the dirt we fling, the sand we kick in the weaklings’ faces, truly creates the best warriors, those whose greatest strength is not to fight. To be humble, weak, lacking the confidence, the highest self-esteem, to irrevocably, to infinity and beyond, toot their horn. Like a jazz trumpeting Kirk Douglas, in black and white, we sing our bodies (and minds) electrocuted. Gas chamber dreams satiate us with the sound of grounded Concords taking off. We take off, achieve lift off, publishing the good, the ugly, but not much of the bad. At the most, that’s the idea. We will publish, follow, allow, create a space for your words, artwork, really great short fiction, its meaning and sound. We invite you to raise our rafters, to shiver our timbers, for in doing so your reach, through this blog-spot and the glorious hard-copy magazine, becomes the future past, through inevitably, the present. Remember everyday is a gift, and that is why it is called the Present.

But enough about the above, let’s get to the below. In our eyes darkness is light. The sound of one hand clapping is almost inaudible. And our faces before we were born, we finally gather, were more ugly than beatific. But let’s get down to it, what art is all about is transcendence and sex. And we, and you, as part of this publication whether writer, reader, or Dixie chicken, are about getting more of both. We hope women, men, hermaphrodites, intelligent chimps and signing apes, both gay, transgender, and lesbian, with dolphins, whales, clever insects, cats and man’s best friend, in one big ignore no one metaphysical, hermeneutical, post structural bareback eunuch orgasmatron. Though as has been said, such is life. Yet, also, remember, death, and getting close to it if you are aware, is as important, and more profound, than birth.

Most of all however, we are about feeling. The feeling one gets when things are going well, when that woman or women, or man or men, or German Shepard makes you feel an air hockey puck, floating on electric air. When you get so happy, small engine churning goodness inside, you know it won’t last, and you better not become too giddy, rise to the height of pure ecstasy, because you know, from experience, the highest highs, the hottest hot, the deepest love, proves shallower, despondent, saccharine, with familiarity breeding lack of interest and base contempt. To be steadfast, through it all, working, thinking, playing, producing, growing, grieving, laughing, celebrating, cooking, eating and drinking, while we, the Two editors of the revivified new Beatnik Cowboy, with a pleasant harsh charm beckon you to Avalon.

We hope to do our best to present you, dear readers and contributors, the most favorable opportunity for continued enlightened sustainable growth. May the new Renaissance begin.

Thank you for joining us on the Journey.

The Editors of the original Beatnik Cowboy

Warning!

They’re coming down the street
A mob breaking into every house
Stealing
Raping
Killing

You weren’t prepared for this
Too many in the madness
Like a rolling tidal wave

You won’t run
This is your home
Your wife and kids hiding in the closet
Terrified
Crying
Praying

You only have a baseball bat
Ready to swing
When they break down your front door

You’re spitting blood you’re so angry
A rock bashing through the window
Footsteps swarming to your door

All those years preceding
Warning of this
And you didn’t believe
It could happen here.

Terror

Unbearable
Inaction at the sight of the scene
Those first seconds shocked

Ringing in the ears
Dry mouth

Someone’s blood spattered on your clothes
Then the screaming
Sirens
Faraway

Jerking into alertness
You begin to move to help

Later discovering you’re one of the dead.

The Cyber Nude

the skull and the rose

when the face
of the clock
shatters;
while
the flies
crawl
the walls
dreaming
of libertarian
socialism;
while
America
goes broke
from
endless
unwinnable
wars
in faraway
lands—
there’ll be
time enough
for
the skull
and the rose,
for
the raven
in the fire
of my endless
night.

another anarchist manifesto

in your democracy
of corporate jets
and homeless families living in shelters

in your republic
of killer cops
and nuclear bombs and drone strikes

there’s still a handful
of noble Marxists
that you’ve locked up in your
prison-industrial complex

or you’ve buried them six feet under
to fertilize your fields of Monsanto GM crops
somewhere out in Kansas

so long as the sheeple
keep paying their taxes and keep on
keeping their mouths shut

and you can kiss my fucking anarchist ass

while the ghost of Howard Zinn chuckles
as the empire smolders away into the ether
just like he said it would.

The Beatnik Cowboy has rode back into town from the sunset…