another new old poem

The Girls Of Covenant Cove

I cling to the shaved legs of my
babysitter while Jenny renders
me mental in the living room,
her thin frame balanced
between my thumbs,
kingdoms away from open fields
beyond her V-Card.

A circus of toothless bullies
left me noosed
next to a pair of giant scissors
in your Dad's shed.

Before the van sped
away, you caught a peek
of the rip in my trousers,
at the gas station,
a peg skipping across two
lakes at once- they 
are on to you.

Something pharmaceutical
fell into you

before you slithered
into a coma,
stranded with a chairman of
impotent evenings,

the ghost
in the graveyard

masturbating behind
a dumpster.

revised poem

My Sister, The Woodchipper

When you were lit
We did bad shit

Before they chased us
Back to the Emporium.

The clouds convulsed
As we puked pink
Through makeshift subdivisions.

She told me to stop staring
And pass her the Hydromorphone.

Later, alone
By the lockers,
I remembered myself two years
Younger, my ear hissing

Against the gameroom entrance,
And you calling through
The scramble of

Infernal engines,
Still young, grazing your
Tongue over gacked gums

While I lay in the trunk
Waiting for you to loosen
The shoelace around my neck.

new (revised) poem

Elegy For Lorna

September,
you slumped over

the air-conditioner,
under the weather,

your mirror
riddled with hairline

fractures,
a cleft reflection

of your
pierced face,

I tried to scoot you
sideways,

away from the balcony,
cornered in

a labyrinthine factory
of porn and taffy,

all I did
that year was chew candy

and mutilate
my froggish body,

pissing red,
you said you were sorry

before I carried you
to the reaper's lobby,

so squirrelly
on your mother's Campari.

new (revised) poem

To a Mirror In Grade School

how did you become so talkative?
when I first met you
some Sophomore
urinated all over your chubby face.

since then,
you've lifted
many heavy
weights,
but the unchanged
heart of a poltergeist
still waits for you
at home

Revised older poem

Memory Of Mary Magdalene

I met you for the first time at Laura's House
after you swallowed every pill in the bag and fell
off the balcony. Someone in the room called you
one crazy mother and they were right.

Outside the Emporium I would wait outside
as you drove by everyday,
leaving my stomach fishy for reasons
only my pecker could answer to.

I heard a rumor 
you had your 
clit pierced when 
you were fifteen. 

No one knows how old you are,
but the whole school still wants to fuck you.

You must take great care of your body.

Not like me,
today my diet consisted of six scotches
and half a bag of Animal Crackers,
which I stopped eating 
after I thought I heard one of them scream for its life. 

What kind of life is it to be trapped in a 
bag all of the time? I guess it's no different than my life, 
or yours, even. You, more than anyone, should know that
we are all breakable little animals, waiting
to be devoured completely.

Mary, I wish you 
would drive past me.

Bludgeon me
while I'm sleeping,
dreaming of your 
wild brown hair

Old revised poem

Justin's Story About Some Lady

so we leave Kevin's
and I'm way too ripped
on something I can't even pronounce
and so is Jason and Jason's driving
and I think maybe he shouldn't be
but we made it to Tracy's
without dying so yeah
on the way there
I saw this woman banging
her head over and over
against a telephone pole
and her face was bleeding
like crazy but
I stayed silent and Jason
kept driving and five minutes
later we were at Tracy's
and I'd forgotten
the woman
and her fucked up face entirely

New Poem

Lorna to the E.R.

The end of the semester arrived
when her head hit the counter,
eyes reeking of pills I gave her.

She came to later
and asked for water,
but I could not hear
her as I was planted

on the shitter, tugging myself
purple to the thought of a
bug-eyed ginger, her lower-
half like a hammer
smashing me into a jizzy batter...

Your voice reached closer, now
a whisper, its timbre softer
than I ever could remember,
my hand raced faster,
fingers forming
a stricter cylinder around my
dweeby member.

Soon some silver arrows
shot promptly to the wall
next to the shower,
from the center they crept down
in the shape of antlers. Your voice
was now lower, sinking with your
body next to the refrigerator.

I sat up at the sound of a knock
but could not answer, too busy
flattening a shaving razor,
waiting for the knocking reaper
to break the door, lift me over
his shoulder and deliver
me back to her.

Old poem- Autobiography Assignment

White Harbor, '96

We moved north of Palatine
to the state-line, where I
swallowed my first twelve years.

Of this time, I remember drinking
Jolt Cola and fucking my sofa,
thinking mostly of Lisa,
an older girl from Catholic School
who crowned me her Prince after
I let her use my urine for
a drug-test.

I remember Nate's brother Nick
showing me how to do cocaine
in his walk-in closet. I felt
sad and nauseous. I saw him
some years later, strung out
at Church's.

My mother was a substitute teacher,
Father a gun collector.
Sister painted her walls black
and blared Reznor, her savior.
I learned depression from her,
as well as how to swear.
My first love was her friend

Shelly, a mousy diet-pill addict
who would sometimes babysit me,
allowing me to watch TV before
falling asleep on her
non-belly.

Old Poem

Case Study

Wednesday, at the parkway,
Elizabeth accepted money from

an undercover deputy. Outside
the Estero Public Library,

Mallory purchases
21 tablets as a present

for Colie. All women,
charged with felonies,

remained friendly as
a total of 55 faces

took custody
of the evening

Revised older poem

Lorna, A minor

We spoke in strangled English
after belted with the garden hoe.
Conceived in cafeterias (hush!),
we were commas tossed through the fleshy O.

Soon the sky was redder than hellish russet,
and Grandpa's pills were gone in a week.
I begged you not to cross it
out, the sentence I sharpied on the back

of your pink and black ledger, where life
found language in shitlists and shades
of private anguish, as if
life was there only to rip you to shreds.

You were born in 1982
to red-eyed equines caked in frost
When you were eight you killed a cockatoo,
my love for you the cost.

new poem

On Ariel

Katie mentioned you
after school while we were

sitting in her room,
orbed by psychoactive fumes.

She told me I would love you,
and quickly introduced you,

not before urging me to take care
of you, to never lose you. I nodded

off for a second. Katie smacked me,
told me she was fucking serious.

You reeked of cannabis. Katie said
not to move too fast, that you were

stranger than the others.
With Hurricane Ivan on the horizon,

we were stuck inside
for the weekend. You were exhausting,

a lioness
with hellish lashes.

You told me about your father,
what a monster. I stayed

with you for hours, and fell asleep
as the storm killed the neighbors.

new poem

O.L.H.

Straighten your sweater and pocket those
poppers, it's Wednesday Mass. We move like
baby cows through the unadorned vestibule,
into the church adjacent

to our crotch-scented gymnasium.
Entering, one might wonder if
this place was designed for an angel
whose eternal musk did not smell

unlike a dollar store candle. We dab
our temples with blessed water, purchased
in bulk from Jewel-Osco, while icons rendered
in stained glass stare pervertedly.

Our Lady Of Humility headlocks me
in puberty as I become visibly
erect for no reason. No angel
can soften the lone Episcopalian.

My friend Nathan cleverly drops acid
at the end of the pew. I catch a whiff
of fish sticks as Father Radcliff passes,
his head as stubby as the cock of

Donatello's David. Two rows up,
God appears in the form of Lynette
Schrader's blonde hair. Like an angel,
she sleeps quietly, dreaming her way out.

new poem

The Sandpiper

She paces outside
The Sandpiper Inn, jaw shifting,
pupils pinned, arms itching under
her black peacoat.

I arrive out the side
of a '94 Ford Tempo,
so thrashed I pass out
in the hallway

of the wrong floor.
4 am: she calls
repeatedly to no answer.
Maybe tomorrow

I'll remember crawling
from a cul-de-sac in Covenant Cove,
covered in urine, repeating
her name. I dream

of my room
at the Sandpiper
littered with empty liters,
cut straws, and Lorna's

crumpled leggings.
I also dream of
things outside my room before
I wake up to her high heel mashing

my genitals.

new poem

“Osprey”

I woke up belly-down in Osprey, spun-out
and swollen near a Salvation Army.
The sky was bloated with clouds
of automotive injury. In the distance,
a siren cried like a baby, drowning
the ringing in my right ear. I could see
the accident clearly from the vacant lot
where my body lay heavy, surrounded
by soggy garbage. There was blood on
the gravel, and a uniformed man with
a Senator's stature overseeing
the stretchers.

Soon, my thoughts were unlucky
creatures waiting to be slaughtered.
I remembered a night in Wisconsin,
wandering naked through the snow, four
years old, my mother finding me frostbitten
before calling an ambulance. I remembered
my face full of liquid morphine.