October 30, 2009 @Deuce Coupe
aside while
filming the
battle of
bloody porch
in the wild
bunch & sd
you looked
good in
that last
shot but it
wasn’t in
tense enough
what the
hell are you
talking abt
johnson
replied i
broke my
finger wor
king that
goddam
machine
gun i don’t
give a fuck
if you broke
yr dick
make it
look like
you are
falling in
love w/that
browning
because it’s
going to
be yr angel
of death
___________
moody, yearning and dark, crowding softly
over the eyes and passing through the nostrils
past the borders of simple awareness,
as if it has become part of the soul,
a soul filled with soft midnight sound,
and the clack of the train behind it
the last sweet knock of sentience
between now and our blessed sleep.
__________
Channeling Norman Mailer by Doug Draime
July 10, 2009–Deuce CoupeAfter the cops tracked
him down in
Bogota, he confessed
on the plane ride
back to the U.S.
to stabbing his wife
to death with a
steak knife, but there
was sort of a disclaimer
attached. He swore he
was channeling
Norman Mailer, but
that he couldn’t
stop himself
at just one stab,
like Mailer did
But, he said, it was
a gruesome, bloody mess,
and that he wished
he’d be able to
channel
William Burroughs,
instead. And he would’ve
just shot her
in the head.
__________
F. N. Wright, February 23, 2011 @Deuce Coupe
JOHNNY
one of my best
friends
from diapers
to levis
both of us being
scouted by major
league scouts
me a hard throwing lefty
with a nasty curveball
& johnny who had all
the five tools they
look for
especially speed
fastest mother fucker
I ever saw
small town politics
got me kicked off
the american legion
baseball team
just before our junior
year of high school
I forced my mother’s hand
& made her sign the papers
so I could enlist in the marines
on my seventeenth birthday
when johnny graduated
from high school he had
a baseball scholarship offer
from a major university
& a decent bonus to sign
with the cardinals
I was in nam when I received
his letter asking what I thought
he should do & first chance I had
I wrote & urged him to go to college
or he could get his ass drafted
before he ever saw busch stadium
stupid fucker did what I would’ve done
& signed with the cardinals &
had moved up to triple a ball
when he was drafted & I was
in nam for my second tour
I was back in Tennessee
when johnny came home
but he wasn’t marching
he couldn’t because he’d lost
both legs to a mine in nam
& I’d left most of my sanity
over there but hid it well
when we first met at a bar for beers
I said, “what are you going to
do now? you sure as hell ain’t
playin’ anymore baseball, you
stupid asshole.”
He laughed & said, “I’m learning
to run the bases on my hands.”
he killed himself opening day
of the following season.
____________
Black Lung Hallelujah by Scott Wannberg
July 26, 2009 @Rusty Truck
Dig deep inside the hurt Earth
and when China finds you
tell all its people
you know a great place for them
to all stay.
The wars claim they are going in for the night
but for them the night never really rides up.
the night got pulled over for speeding
and the magician can’t find any rabbits in town
that will allow him to
pull them out of anything.
July 16 2009
__
Oh Susanna
Johnstown
____________
To a King of Sorts by Joie Cook
August 18, 2009
All of the women
Who have opened your heart with their wounds
Call to you now
From the last row of the dark cinema
Kelly with her enormous breasts
Chelsea with her thin, swaggering hips
Marlena, the poet, the one you loved best,
Who will suffer the most when you die
All the women of your magnum opus
Some call pornography
You imagine them breathing softly
As you sleep with your wife
Hear their sighs
As you retire into middle age – a sexless marriage
A mortgage and children you never see
They were so beautiful then
Your naked dreamers
Forever preserved
The women, who return again and again
A gift to the aching now of your fevered past:
Celluloid flesh reminders of your lost empire.
Joie Cook
San Francisco
____________
LAST LEAVES by Hugh Fox
April 11, 2010 @Rusty Truck
Why does the collection of my dead always come back now,
some places still a glorious blend of yellows and reds, others j
just black trunks and empty limbs in the last November rain, just on
the edge of snow?
“Howya doin’, Hughie?”
Bespeckled, swollen-legged, practical black-shoed Gram, or
mon mere, “Will you please pass the sugar,” making
it sound like “Fire!,” mon pere, Mr. Double-Belly,sucking
on a cigarette or (special occasions) cigar, turkey all over
the tables in my brain, and trees going up, wreathes, Bless
me, Father, for I have, God rest you merry gentlemen…wanting
Mary Joan and Shirley and Guiliana and Patricia and Dolores
and Shirley all back,Lynn coming in the midnight door to
spend the night in my high-heaven hallucinogenic dreams,
the Chicago-LA-NYC-Boston-Paris-BC streets
Rusty Truck 