Politics

 

Never thought

Peeing in our pants

Would feel good

 

The world drying up

With cold insincerity

 

Excrement running down

Our backsides

Leaving a trail

That even rats won’t follow.

 

 

State of the Union

 

After you run me over

Please back up

And finish the job

 

Don’t leave

A bleeding heart

Still alive in the gutter.

See Yourself Out

Get thee behind me!
Into the past where you belong.
Filed away under ‘Mistakes’
not ‘What Might-Have-Beens’
I hope the door hits you
on the way out… twice.
I shall ponder you
unnecessary no more.
You cease to exist
in the living, breathing
real world of today.
I glimpsed around
the front you hide behind.
Your honey-traps
and blasphemies
have lost their curiosity.
No more games & fishing,
emotional military advancements.
The magic bubble
of your preying attraction
just blew up in your own face.

© Paul Tristram 2016

Scene Two

 

The other day,

I was having a cigar

outside of a girlfriend’s house.

She lives in a demilitarized zone

where violent crime is day by day.

And out of nowhere this beautiful cream-colored

Porsche pulls up with the Jimmy John’s display sign

sitting atop of the car.

The guy behind the wheel looked like a former

company head: white, mid-fifties, lost and confused,

slightly suicidal, but not quite ready to throw in the towel.

And having survived the eight year political carnage

of neighborhood foreclosures, bankruptcies, and job losses,

she said, “now that’s one poor motherfucker.”

Young Love

When you were five
And I was six,
We would hold hands
Just like this.

When you were nine
And I was ten,
We made a pact
To never tell, and then:

You began to tell me every word
That escaped from your lips, with cold secret stares.
A look or a glance through long
Fingertips. Your beautiful face.

I see you sitting by the stair, your body
Tight in hot sun, a sad lamb
On stage. And when I have passed you
Flushed red raw, I want to remember

How young we were.
Splayed out across the pitch
Like baby starfish, pink and pinched
As tongue’s blood.

Our father and mother are in silent reverie,
With knotted wrists and electric hair,
Nodding and clapping, as dumb waiters do
To our games. When we are together we are together.

Today we are family as the ill
Walk in lines, with shaken smiles that marry us.
Mother, to me you are a figure of fun.
Father, you are a child when you wake up each morning.

 

Hello, I’ve been absent for a while. I had right shoulder replacement surgery, got home from the hospital, sat around for about twenty minutes, got up to get something from the kitchen, stepped on my left leg and broke it at the ankle. I went down, my shoulder experienced paroxysms of pain, and my foot flopped about awkwardly as I struggled to get back in my chair and phone for help. Meanwhile I tried to get my foot to pop back in. Nothing doing. I waited with sideways foot, excruciating pain, shoulder sutures bleeding and a regal bearing. Apparently physical pain I can handle; it’s mental pain that slays me. Even the ambulance driver said I was a tough guy.

 

I’m in an in my home convalescence period now and the problem is I’m having problems concentrating and for thirteen days I didn’t write. But now that’s changing, until the pain and a general don’t move and only watch TV hopeless sort of impulse comes over me again, and I disengage from even reading activity. I can barely play guitar. I tried and though my jam partner said it sounded good, I couldn’t go on. The home health care worker asked me if I was depressed and I said yes. I’m in a wheelchair, my shoulder is infected and draining, I’m eating antibiotics and on Monday at 8:00 AM I go back for an emergency appointment with the doctor if I don’t go to ER sooner. What’s more, I ran out of weed. I’m trying for brutal honesty here. If it’s too much for you, hey stay anyhow! Yee-haw!

 

I read some poetry. For me it was good poetry, but of course they published one of mine at Mad Swirl so I go there to read it and make me mistake of reading the other contributors works. They all were so good! And I’m wonderin’ “am I worthy?”

 

Stellar cats those other contributors. If I read too much really good poetry I start getting emotional inside. I start thinking so much so good out there. And I in no way do I want to push it to try to stack up and lose my poetry ubiquity. I must go beyond, below, and above, but not exactly too much with the general flow.

 

Now watch me heal, get even better than I was – more knowing of pain, injury and disability challenge – and head off into the Philippines to find a mate. As for you-all continue writing and sending poems. We’re addicted. Thank you all, lovingly.

 

Dr. Randall Rogers

7/23/2016

Rapid City, South Dakota, USA.

when an abortion doesn’t take

 

 

I never asked to be born.

 

So Pa,

you should have

shot me into

the sheets,

 

and Ma,

you never should

have received

the seed

 

of me,

 

because

afterbirth

was just a mess.

 

 

Previously published by The Camel Saloon.

 

We are still in search across the open plains for the best words to feature in The Best Of The Beatnik Cowboy Volume #2. All contributors selected and subscribers will also receive an additional book, the reincarnate of the “Black Tits” poems by Dr. Randall Rogers and Chris Butler.

Keep the Good Word cumming!

Imprisoned Skin

 

We’re all prisoners to the skin we inherited. The most gargantuan organ of the human body is the first and only everyone sees, unless you get slit open with a scalpel. We all bleed red. We all shit brown. We all piss yellow. But we are all judged by the first impression. That’s beyond this greatest depression.

Psycho killers look at all of us based on that first impression. No more time to ask if you are Christian, Jewish, Muslim, American, European, African, Asian, etc. in the age of instant gratification and angry masturbation. They just grab their semi-automatics, their homemade pressure cookers, pipe bombs, and whatever vehicle of genocide to snuff out human live.

The most important thing about life is being alive. It’s the one and only thing the dead envy of us. Despite the pain, despite the anxiety, despite the everyday ennui, we are better off alive than dead. That’s the only thing the dead know.

The suit covering the skin is of no matter. It can be blue, brown, camouflaged, or a stained wife beater. We are all born naked and frightened, especially after the doctor’s spanking, but we all will die the same way. In a suit six feet under the world we once knew, or as a John Doe with an unmarked grave, absent of well-wishers’ and family members’ rotting plastic flowers.

 

Heaven

 

In my mid-twenties, when everything went sideways,

It seemed I ended up in Elkins West Virginia,

for no other reason than it was the last town before those old mother mountains

took over, wrapping addled heads in gauze, putting spinning thoughts to sleep.

 

Outside Elkins, heaven was a hole in a rock,

seen clear from the highway, cars and microbuses parked on the berm in neat lines.

If you jumped the fence, skinny down the gulley, back up the other side,

there would be greetings from private property waterfalls,

forty foot drops, open cavern doubling as shallow lake.

 

Summertime,

hippie girls and boys passed joints,

kids played in the falls

old people sat on canvas chairs

beautifulandillegalandfree.

 

Fall and winter, alone at the pulpit

respite found and passed in silent congregation.

Eventually those mother mountains couldn’t hold me.

 

In return, years later, heaven desolate, heaven gone.

Water dammed above empty holes in rocks

sun seated on interstate clouds

nofallsnohippiesnojointsnokids

Lake nothing, a series of dried muddy stones.

 

I wonder to an empty cliff face whether stories of

travelsandbedsandbarsandwomenanddrunks,

are enough to keep you, to insulate you when

whatever nest you build starts to come down.

I wonder what is man without heaven?

 

jason baldinger

 

 

The Hymn to Grease

 

10:30 am

the breakfast McDonalds smell

changes

to the lunch McDonalds smell

The ear infection no better

it took over with an upper repertory infection

a few weeks ago

I barely function

I’ve been out of work a few months

shit hasn’t gotten serious yet

it’s coming,

lungs rattle regular now

 

I had a panic attack the other night

seated

edge of the bed

short gulps at air

almost an hour

my girlfriend insisting on a hospital

declining

it takes full minutes to explain

aversions to hospital bills

forged

by a six thousand dollar ER visit

ten years

I get bills for paper hats

send a ten spot check every time

this is reality

with no insurance

 

today I’m talking to the McDonald’s manager

about the management program

sipping a small coke

hand over my mouth

to keep dry heaves down

every question answered behind my eyes

“Do Not Vomit”

deep breathe answers

 

He asks another question

grease smell attack

I think about a girl I dated

about the time of the hospital bill

she worked burger king

we’d race her home

race out of clothes

into a shower

so we didn’t breathe that smell

 

done with questions

he never took note of what I said

I’ll get the job

everybody does

if you show up

you weed yourself out

unless

you’re desperate enough to stay

 

I won’t show for the shift

fingers crossed

I find better work

a silver lining

I

never

vomited

once

 

jason baldinger

 

Last Call

 

Ohio is forever

variable roadways eat speed.

and it’s the perfect night for speed,

the perfect night for Adderall

the perfect night for Ephedrine

but I never could handle speed.

It makes my heart into a hummingbird dying in my chest.

I already see thing too clearly, too loud,

speed makes all that vision hurt.

Instead, I eat miniature candy bars, Altoids

chase a sugar rush, crash and repeat

 

Tonight, Orion’s belt is guide.

If unbuckled the sky open

would rain corn stalks and bibles.

 

Corn stalks and bibles

it’s twenty years ago,

racing interstates after a sixteen hour work day.

Crazy Mike and a bag of Doritos as passengers.

Frozen solid Ohio

the night proves

all highways have ghosts

it’s only a matter of how tired you are,

how split open you are.

 

We hit Dayton 5 am,

our buddy Brian said we’re twelve hours late.

Payphone calls, convenience stores, below zero nights,

he was at his girls place

He shook his roommate up with telephones

his addled roommate who tried to kill himself a month before,

standing at dorm entrances late night disheveled

holding open doors  so we could crash,

kill some sleep

nervous paranoid sleep.

 

We skated around Dayton less than twelve hours

before parting with a snowstorm.

On the other side of that front

I found my grandfather had a heart attack.

I drove three hours caught and re-caught a storm

crashed the floor of an imaginary trailer park.

dead.

 

rattled nights

all these years

dead.

 

My grandfather was dead in months.

Brian tossed a bullet in his head in ‘02

a failing marriage and no job were too much,

unless you believe

that his wife’s parents knocked him off to avoid a messy divorce.

 

Crazy Mike blurted out his suicide to me

Christmas eve that year.

I was busy holding down a record shop,

he was stalling, waiting, finally blurting

I excused myself, went to catch a cigarette

Indianapolis seemed so far away.

 

Crazy Mike is still crazy

we haven’t talked much since the night

he clocked me in the face with a guitar.

He still chases demons that have already gotten away.

Last time we spoke he used words like schizophrenia

 

It should be no surprise that that time escapes

rattles, drifts, evaporates, years seem so far away.

I drive, a nauseous dizzy feeling

that would be speed except its sugar.

I wind the engine damn near 100

bleary, I should pull over

but I’m too deep in my head

I can’t stop.

 

I barely notice the deer

drop off accelerator, swerve

I expect the red and blue splash in the rearview

The officer, one am aviators,

“son, what’s your hurry?”

my eyes dilated diamonds

smile wide as stars says

“baby, I’m just trying

to make Pittsburgh for last call