Category: POEMS

I’m selling fear today people!
I’m selling FEAR today!

FEAR HERE!
GETCHER FREE FEAR HERE!

That’s right man.

Fear Mother Nature
she’s coming this way hurricane like and she’s
in a bad fucking mood!

Fear the black man he drag you from car and shoot you!

Fear air conditioners falling from high rise!
Death from above the headline say!

Fear candles! They fire and fire dangerous!

FEAR HERE!
GETCHER FREE FEAR HERE!

Fear on the five o’clock, six o’clock, ten o’clock, eleven o’clock news and if that’s not enough they have 24 hours of fear on several news networks!

Fear donuts!

Fear women…they have the power to control you!

Fear red meat! Yer heart’ll explode!
Fear so bad you scared to walk out yer door!

Fear diet soda! It’ll make you fat too!

Fear the damned young people with they rebellion and life gustos!

Fear gay people! If they touch you, you get gay too!

FEAR HERE!
GETCHER FREE FEAR HERE!

Fear this disease, that disease. Fear the bugs they is getting savvy and the medicines no work!

Fear the Muslim he give you TNT enema!

Fear big city it wild and brutal! Fear small town it dead and un-resurrected like Judas!

Fear guns! Well…this a good fear to me. People kill people, but guns make it too easy. I would give every criminal a salami. It would take a lot to bludgeon someone to death with a salami.

Fear old people! They poop themselves and get smelly like mothballs!

Fear Loch Ness Monster, Sasquatch, Bermuda Triangle and Roswell crash site!

Fear fat! Fear carbohydrates! Fear hydrogenated vegetable oil! Fear everything you eat!

Fear the air you breathe and water you drink!

Fear dark night and your unlocked doors!

Fear the Hispanic man! He growing big in new Census!

Fear urban myth hook hand hatchet carrying boogie man!

FEAR HERE!
GETCHER FREE FEAR HERE!

Fear the cops! No man…I really mean this one…Fear the cops…They have guns and are poorly trained! This is a worthy fear to partake of in a deep manner.

Fear the immigrants! Unless of course they mowing your lawn or cleaning your toilet or picking up your trash or washing your baby’s smelly ass…

Fear getting out of bed, driving to work, walking to school, going to store for bread and whiskey!

Fear salt!

Tie me off and shoot me with my fear dose from the government!

Fear poor people! They gonna sink the ship! Put them to work cleaning toilets!

Fear the coming new Ice Age! Fear asteroid BOOM!

Fear expiration dates on foods! Old food’ll kill ya!

FEAR HERE!
GETCHER FREE FEAR HERE!

Fear exploding tires on new SUVs!

Fear restaurants! Grocery stores! Donut shops! They all got vermin what poops everywhere!

Fear conspiracies!

Fear USA! Another worthy fear if you Third World and on the wrong side of the table this week! Or if your France…

Fear earthquakes and California falling into the ocean!

Fear the wise Orientals, they smart, getting smarter, and wanna date yer daughter!

Fear another day when the earth stops spinning!

FEAR HERE!
GETCHER FREE FEAR HERE!

Free fear…free fear…free fear…free fear…and all these fears are worthless…and all these fears are distracting us…Distracting us from the things we should fear:

The cops, the guns,
the cops with the guns
the cops with the guns that work for
the government that tells us to fear everything.

They’re scared we gonna find out who we should really be scared of
and we should really be scared of them
and that’s why they got the most guns.

(To the tune of “Short People Got No Reason”)

Quit writing poetry now!
Surrender your pens,
send them to your
favorite Third World
nation. The children there
have no writing utensils for
school. Worldwide literacy
is more important than
your shitty poetry.

Quit now!
Send your still sealed bond reams,
unfilled filler paper, sketchbooks
spiral bound notebooks and any other
clean paper in your home
to the local recycling station. The
world needs toilet paper and
dinner napkins.

Quit now!
And use the pages of your
Thesaurus to mask off the
windowpanes. It’s cheaper
than curtains.

Quit now!
Your dictionary would work
well in your new career as a
serial arsonist. Just think about it…
you can call yourself the Dictionary Torch
and leave erudite, cliche
riddles for the cops,
“I am neither here nor there,
but everywhere. Fat chance you’ll
catch me o’ denizens of donut shoppes!”

Quit now!
Send your desk to the Army Corps
of Engineers. They can sink it with
the old subway cars for use as an
artificial reef. Artificial reefs attract
loads of fish and are great for recreational
fishermen!

Quit now!
Use your hands for something useful
like playfully spanking your own ass,
planting petunias
or helping the Amish raise a barn.
Please…anything that keeps your fingers
busy and away from your keyboard.

Quit now!
It’s official, you’ve given rise to a horrifying
culture of need and unjustified praise.
Kiss my ass please, I’ll be sure to kiss yours.
Nice poem…I need a psychiatrist…wanna fuck?

Quit now!
Use your computer for something useful
like downloading porn, hacking governmental web sites,
importing S&M leather gear from England or Germany
or balancing your checkbook to save yourself those
annoying overdraft charges.

Quit now!
Take the volumes of poetry you’ve bought
that have lead you down this false path and
donate them to the local skinheads so they might
practice their book burning skills in the woods down
by the river.

Quit now!
The following will soon be classified as felonies:
murdering the English language,
maudlin whining poesies,
linking together cliche trains and calling them poetry,
Choo! Choo!
Use of phrases similar to
the following shall result in sentences of death by
fire ant mounds:
O’ woe…my indigo soul suffers in utter darkness.
I am a poet and I bleed…utter darkness.

Quit now!
Your dreams are illusions of smog and dysfunction.
Please buy some new ones at your local discount department store.
They have clothing patterns, perhaps you could become a fashion designer.

My $15 keyboard has
survived a year of the wars.

A year of cat hair. There may be
more if it between its keys than
what remains on the resident cat collective.

A year of , “What the hell did I spill
on here last night and do I want to know?”

A year of friends found
friends lost
friends expelled toward exile.

A year of madness and alcohol
rage, long winters and cigarette ash
depression, and stifling humidity
minor victories and amicable separations.

Perhaps a key removal Windex spit shine
is in order. But I admit a certain fondness
for your new fuzzy scarred bedraggled
appearance. It is fitting. Besides, that
cleaning idea reeks of effort that would
exceed the cost of a new shiny $15 keyboard.

1.
“Hey man…How you been?
Long time no see!”

Of course,
I had no idea
who the hell this
dude was, but I did know
the path the conversation
would follow next.

“Hey man…I need a
cup of coffee and a
pack of smokes…
you got fifty cents
or
a dollar?”

“Sure thing man…”
I slipped a dollar from the
dwindling contents of my pocket.

“Thanks man…I’ll see
you ’round…”

“Surely…take it easy.”

2.
Jim drags along a small,
gathering confrontation
as he approaches the truck…

“No thank you!”

“How about a smoke?”

“No thank you!”

The truck door slams…He sits
quietly for a few seconds,
“I’m going to Hell
for sure.”

3.
Dear Mr/Mrs/Ms
BuddhaBrahmaVishnuShiva,
is karma
transferable?

I’d hate to see
a friend fry
or be reincarnated
as a tape worm over
one cigarette denied.

Please drop me a postcard
and let me know.

Signed,
Little Stevie Kramer

4.
Dear Little Stevie,

Sorry, karma is not a
tradable commodity. Your friend
wil indeed become a tape worm
in his next life and you will
be his host. How’s that for a
roundabout boot to the ass?

Signed,
The Four Corners of the Square

5.
Man…fuck you guys…I’ll
take this matter up with the
catholics. They invented instant
karma for $500 or less and I hear
they need cash for lawyers.

The Emperor Chin was ruthless.

The Emperor Chin trekked through the
wilds of the countryside seeking
the elixir of eternal life and youth,
yet abetted his own premature demise
at forty-nine by imbibing magic
potions of arsenic, lead and sulfur.

The Emperor Chin burned books.

The Emperor Chin gave contrary scholars
the option to help build his Great Wall
or to be buried alive. Some choice.

The Emperor Chin had a pigeon chest.

When confronted by one of his astrologers
and told that he must blood sacrifice 10,000 men
or his Great Wall was doomed to be incomplete
forever, The Emperor Chin, knowing he could
never spare 10,000 men for empty sacrifice,
sought out one man whose name
contained the Chinese character representing 10,000
and entombed him in The Wall. Poor unlucky bastard.

The Emperor Chin was a creative problem solver.

Mr. 10,000’s ghost still wanders The Wall,
ringing a small bronze bell, cursing his parents
and chanting the character that doomed him.

The Emperor Chin sleeps in a fabulous tomb.

I would say most
people have goals in life,
but mine usually tilt away
from mainstream ideals.

Like this morning,
I realized that my goal for next
summer is to mow my lawn
infrequently enough
that I use only
one gallon
of gas
for
the whole
six month
growing season.

This goal is a wonderful
admixture of
geo-politics
(I am seeking to
become less dependant
upon Middle Eastern
petroleum),
environmental
concern
(All that carbon mono
dioxide crap goes up)
and
good old fashioned
American
lassitude.

Hey…
at least I
have a marginal
propensity
toward honesty.

On one side of the street,
the finale of the New Year’s fireworks
display booms, flowers and smokes.

On the other side of the street,
the porch of the funeral parlor is
jammed with black coats, pants and dress shoes
some sneak beer swigs from paper bags or
smoke obvious cigarettes.

If I were a real poet…
I would pen you a long, melodic, terribly boring ode
about the ironic juxtaposition of celebration and grief
or
about how the extremes of Life can be separted by a simple
double yellow line in the road
or
speculating over a stranger’s loved one who will
not see fireworks nor anything else, for that matter this new year.

Sadly, and not so sadly, I am not a real poet,
so I’ll just say I was just glad to be walking down the street,
holding hands with my wife, watching the fireworks, thinking
how happy I was not to be in a box in a stuffy funeral home
and wondering if it would be in bad taste to ask one of
coats, pants or shoes on the darkened porch if they had an extra beer.

Someone is sneaking into
my house while I sleep,
stealthing to my bedside
and bending the frames of
of my glasses so they sit
crookfaced cockeyed
when I put them on
in the morning.

Either that
or my head is
shifting shape
during the
night.

Perhaps…
I should not be telling
you this.

People
have
turned
on me
for far less
than these
obvious
dustings
of
paranoid
schizophrenia.

1.
I shall now sit here, blow my nose and think about you, mighty
Death. O great and mighty equalizer, who comes for the
wealthy and the poor alike, well that’s mostly true, but let’s
be honest here, you come earlier and more frequently
for the poor than the wealthy. Do the poor taste like
chicken? I like chicken. You kill chickens too, old hen a
heap in the yard, ready for delicious dumplings, the blind
red heads of pullets cleaved to the ground by my grandfather. You
killed him with slow pneumonia in the VA hospital, but I don’t
hold grudges, much. After all, we each have our job and what’s to be
done must
be.

2.
Good morning Death! How did you sleep? You don’t? Well no wonder
you look so drawn, worn and peaked. You should try sleep it’s really very
nice. Anyway, it puzzles me why I am thinking about you today. It’s a beautiful
day, a weekend, nothing to do beyond sit in the shade and think pleasant
thoughts, but here you are. I don’t really like when you do this. I’d rather
ponder you at 3AM, two thirds through a bottle of tequila, beneath
buckets of rain on a lonely street, at a wake, with crisp suits and rouged
cheeks or while sitting on the toilet. No offense, but thinking about you while
a deep blue sky arrays itself overhead and the May sun gently shines and a breeze from
the east teases the back of my neck is too damned depressing.

3.
O mighty End that comes for all, that pursues both the little fluffy brown birds outside
my morning window and equally the huge and the mighty, coastal redwoods, blue whale, grey
L’elephant all fall low beneath your slow gnawing or sudden swift tooth. Animal, vegetable or
crustacean, flora and/or fauna, beast and beauty, swine on par with mother
bivalve, chicken and wielders of hatchets. You are one busy dude.
How do your do it all? Outsourcing, of course! Everything is your agent, hatchet
wielder kills chicken, microbe kills hatchet wielder, lion kills antelope, Spanish
flu kills millions, man kills everything with varying degrees of efficacy. I’ll
wager favorite odds that bristlecone pines piss you off.

4.
Hello Death, it’s me Steven.
I am still thinking about you, there’s not much else do
around here on Sunday beside drink beer, assemble
an exercise bike, shovel the sidewalk, walk the dog a mile
and one half and think of you, great, almighty ungraspable you!
I suppose that’s what Sundays were meant for: exercise bikes, shoveling,
walking, meditation and beer. Uh-oh Death, the church folk are
going to be angry with me. I’d ask you take them in the
name of sweet, sweet vengeance, but you already got them
covered at a later date and I figure I better keep my mystical
favors for a better use. O Lotto!

5.
O mighty scythe master, wearer of black ratty cloak replete with
ominous hood I think of you here now on Tuesday. Have I ever
mentioned Tuesday is my favorite day? Well damn, I thought you
knew everything about your victims. O I see…well anyway…if you
can, please don’t take me home sweet home on a Tuesday, it would
result in my being extremely conflicted about my favorite day.

6.
Hey Death, while I have you, remember a while back, you stopped over, rang the bell, I
forget which of us you were coming for that dark and stormy
night, and we didn’t answer the door? Pretty funny eh? I like how you
said screw it, walked next door and killed the neighbor’s dog. That
was sweet. A body is a body. I’ll get the other the next time I’m
in the neighborhood. That’s so damned awesome.

7.
Well Death, I am through thinking about you for now. You’re busy
anyway, you said something about an appointment three towns east. Don’t worry, I’ll
be thinking about you again soon. I like to think about you. It’s occasionally
debilitating, but I am HUGE fan, a REAL fan not one of those fair weather, I ponder
death at wakes or after a friend’s rebellious left hand turns against the mind that
feeds it or 2/3 through a bottle of tequila while walking a 3AM street in a driving rain
kind of fan, a watch the last out of a 19-2 blow out, wait for the three hour rain delay for
a west coast game that will not end until 2AM or thereabouts fan, a REAL fan as in
the shortened version of FANATIC. So if possible, remember what I said about
Tuesdays, it would be sweet if you could make that happen. And say hello to your
Mom for me, O tempting, tempestuous Sin! She’s such a little minx that one, we
go way back. And oh, remember the secret knock when you come for me and hey the
neighbors have another dog bro’.
A body is a body.
You kill me.
And will.

It’s true. Dead sells.

Dead sells because we, the people, are dabblers,
poseurs and procrastinators.

Dead sells because we, the people, request an
explanation for or at least a probing, vivid, graphic
exploration of tragedy.

Dead sells because we, the people, demand prophecy.

Dead sells because we, the people, are rubberneckers
and death is life’s version of a 160 car pileup on the
interstate.

Dead sells because we, the people, need to take what
was and postulate a “what if…” future.

Dead sells because it is a pinch of mystery in the
simple, the cliche, the everyday mundane stew.

Dead sells because we, the people, need relics,
talismans and charms.

Dead sells because there will be no more
new releases, no more cutting edge projects,
no more songs, no more words, no more images,
no more perfect explorations of
emptiness
phone booths or
cigarette stained fingertips,
no more anything.

By necessity we must reach for what was.

It’s true. Dead sells.
Ask Van Gogh.