Van Gogh's Ear

Imagine a split skull with a fossil
Of a sunflower seed
On its once sun spotted forehead.
Try to memorize that
We're sick homo sapiens
With razors to our ears
And epileptic suns
In the crumpled minds that
Maddened a Dutch head.
Mad, mad, mad
With tangy thujone* and yellow.
Mad, mad, mad
For the warm, warm, warm
Waist of a rouge woman.
Only a saturated suicide in return
For a canvass to turn into an urn.

My Draft Box

Car ride to church
With no brake fluid
Mother father silent
Listen to the corrosion, hallelujah
Car ride to church to
A hypocritical feast
Of phantom crosses
I'm a veteran
To a beer can
The aftertaste of a tear

Heroes

When I went inside a taco place in the middle of Joshua Tree, David Bowie was on the TV screen singing Heroes and I got so excited. fejwaruwaprewa I have really poor grammar today. Soooo that song will always remind me of the desert.

villanelle

I guess there was someone I had in mind when I wrote this.


Sorry, but I’ve got a confession to make
Porcelain cows from their mouths spit bile
Spare me some sober, for god’s sake

A spoonful of that fountain youth lake
Pastille my world, if only for a while
Sorry, but I’ve got a confession to make

The cardboards stained, its fake
Cigarette needles and dollar pills beguile
Spare me some sober, for god’s sake

Tainted veins curl round Salems stake
Unscrew me in my sleep, three numbers you dial
Sorry, but I’ve got a confession to make

My bones are detached, so I rake
Them into this wind blown pile
Spare me some sober, for god’s sake

Pocketknife metal glides along my neck nape
Twist me into some cold case file
Sorry, but I’ve got a confession to make

You all chant of what I didn’t take
Of what I’ve preached for mile by mile
Spare me some sober, for god’s sake

My earth brains are Land of Oz fake
I wish to see some more lunatics smile
Sorry, but I’ve got a confession to make

And so I’ll find my own escape
I’m only waiting for my last trial
Sorry, but I’ve got a confession to make
Spare me some sober, for god’s sake

I was there =) 7-22-09

A Salute To Agent Orange

Something I'm submitting to Gemini magazine and some other literary magazines/contests


I drowned and swelled with Agent Orange when I was inside my mother on a ship to the United States. It unfurled around my head like a halo of poisoned tangerine raindrops and they popped one by one like bubble wrap as they fell in the form of an acid, scalding my eyes into bulging white craters. It mangled my head into some Z shaped monstrosity and it thinned my legs to bruised, sickly looking branches. I look into a mirror and see a chemically twisted creature barely resembling a human. Agent Orange thought I was a vegetable so it crushed and strangled me with its plastic grasp. It took a hold of my face with its blistered fingers and skinned my cheekbones raw with its venom rimmed acrylics. So, in the meantime I hid from society in the Mojave Desert. On some days, the Mojave moon would tempt me to hug its shadow down in the dark pits of the canyon.

I had a picture of Nefertiti pinned to the mirror in my trailer. Her eyes were like the layers of a clam. Underneath the heart, the digestive glands, and the stomach there were black rimmed pearls. She had a perfectly sculpted nose and lips like persimmon. She wore scarabs on her slim fingers and flexed them as if she meant to dazzle her sun gods in the sky. Her headdress hung down her naked shoulders like slabs of salmon. I worshipped her beauty and often tried to imitate the way she framed her eyes with a royal black border and rouged her symmetrical cheeks into pink lychees. I would paint my nails in electric blue. The nail polish smelled of an electric blue hallucination that coated the back of my throat in something that resembled gasoline fumes. My stubby and skin picked fingers looked even more hideous, but what difference did it make. I suspected the electric blue would peel off eventually like the glossy skin of an apple. I looked up and saw my Johnny Cash record still spinning with sweet grace along its platform keeping me alive.

My trailer seemed to dissolve in the chunks of this salt rink land of sand, dust and sun. At night the shadows of saguaros would satisfy their thirst by milking the white from the stars. A Yucca lizard curls its military colored tail around a tarantula and presses until it turns blue. These days, I sit in my trailer, now tipped over to the side like a shipwreck and stare at my posters of Goya’s las pinturas negras.

Then the time came when my body began to taste the bitter syringe. Death tasted like unsweetened coffee, it was sharp, stung and made you cringe. In a way dying, was like a bitter lime constricting your entire body, dissolving your intestines in this white foam of hydrogen peroxide that curled around what it mistook for wounds. Then you let yourself crust, and wake up in the same desert with a rusting trailer shriveling in the yellow slices of sun as Johnny Cash’s voice speaks of hurt. His voice comes in a dried up yodel that makes snakelike currents across the sand. Agent Orange would sit on my right shoulder and blow its fungi breath on my face until I would rot into the war crippled child of Agent Orange.