pull-ups by Steve Calamars

and rob plath poems
beneath pencil-yellow dawn
and an eraser-pink sunrise
leaving smudges inside my skull
that stain my thoughts and
pollute my pens
to the point where i’m  smearing
dirty words across filthy white
pages and tossing these
garbage-pail poems at publishers
like tiny targets
where sometimes my work sticks
septic as tetanus-dipped spitballs—

tiny natural disasters by Steve Calamars

my heart beat registers a 7.5 on the richter scale turning my brain waves into tsunamis that smash thru my forehead and crash down onto the pages of my notebooks destroying empty white spaces drowning them beneath black ink and words that wash up against the margins like tidal waves you see my poems are born out of violence tiny natural disasters that touch down like tornadoes and pound the page with trailer park calligraphy

if poems can’t protect you, you better learn to throw a punch by Steve Calamars

gorilla sunshine
pounds my
skin-shell

i drag a 300-pound
sled across the asphalt
out back behind
the gym

my calves feel
like cinder-blocks
my thighs tree-trunks

because words mean
little in the face of
fists and muscle

pencil-necks and
chicken-legs maybe
more often than not
produce poems

but fundamentally
the world doesn’t
give a shit about syllables
scrawled across a
sheet of paper

it only respects
a strong back and
monstrous forearms

sometimes not even that

so i pull this sled
across the asphalt

my heart pumping
ether thru my lungs

and pick up my pen
with the strain of
a dead-lift

and try to break your
jaw with the weight of
my words

the way i would with
my fists if you were
here right now—