Sunday, January 30, 2011

Knowledge

The day approaches
When I will know more
About the Marvel Universe
Than the actual universe,
The day when someone asks,
“What is the Purple Man’s power?”
And I say, “Mind control,”
The day when someone asks,
“What is Nick Fury’s clone’s name?”
And I say, “It’s Max Fury of course,”
The day when someone asks,
“Who are Spider-Man’s clones?”
And I say, “Kaine and Ben Reilly.”
The day when someone asks,
“What are the laws of motion?”
And I stare off into the void,
Lost in a world I don’t understand,
Terrified of what I’ve become,
What I’ll never be again.
I will be reading poetry at UNT on Friday, March 11 from 5:30pm to 8:30pm. I don't know the room number yet, but I hope they figure it out soon.

The headline act is this guy Buddy Wakefield.

His readings are intense and energetic. He doesn't subscribe to the "awkward deadpan" school of poetry reading like I do.

Friday, January 28, 2011

The Haunting

Some houses are haunted by murder victims,
Civil war soldiers, or melancholy brides.
My house is haunted by cavemen.

I wake to guttural voices,
And four Neanderthals cower around my bed,
Clearly disturbed by my clock radio.

I try to communicate with them
Using hand gestures, basic sign language.
They only shriek at me and wave their arms.

When I’m making pancakes in the kitchen,
They poke at the flame with see-through fingers,
And try to grab the pan with hands made of smoke.

I can’t turn the TV on because they hate it.
They think it’s a portal to the afterlife.
They think Everybody Loves Raymond is hell.

I brought in a famous TV psychic
To explain why they haunt my house.
He said they were terrified of my ipod dock.

I pressed him for more information.
He said they were terrified of electricity.
Also, fire, carpet, and the golden retriever.

He shrugged his shoulders,
And said they don’t speak English.
Then he went home.

All day and all night, they shriek and hoot and squeal.
They run around the house naked, flailing, wide eyed.
It’s not scary, but it’s very distracting.

Thursday, January 27, 2011

Giraffe

If we can breed man-eating wolves
Into yippy dogs the size of pigeons,
Surely we can take giraffes from Africa,
And breed a smaller domesticated version
That can sleep in my laundry room at night,
Peer over the fence at neighbors,
And give me rides to and from class.
Let it dream of roaming the savannah,
Plucking leaves from the tallest tree,
And kicking lions with legs like flagpoles.
Let it long for a world it could never live in,
Where a coyote couldn’t slip into the yard,
And snap its long neck with one bite,
Where a human couldn’t leap on its back
And ride it around like a damn horse,
Where all giraffes weren’t forcibly neutered
For reasons never fully understood.
Where is my mini-giraffe?
Where is it?

Tuesday, January 25, 2011



Bargain Bin Rats

Pay attention, America.
There is a sale on rats.
All rats in America are on sale.
These rats are on sale for ten dollars.
These rats are bargain bin rats.
These rats are clearance rats.
These rats are discount rats.
These rats are previously owned rats.
For the price of a Playstation 3,
You can have forty rats.
You can have a Playstation 3
Or you can have forty rats
Watch the rats run
Around your living room,
Around your sister’s bedroom.
Around your parents’ refrigerator.
Cash in your parents’ life insurance policy,
And buy ten thousand rats.
Ten thousand rats or a new house.
You can have a new house or ten thousand rats.
What are you going to name all your rats?
This rat is Chester.
This rat is Samantha.
This rat is Christopher.
This rat is Brian.
This rat is Janice.
This rat is Tyrone.
This rat is Marcel.
This rat is Pasha.
This rat is William S. Burroughs.
This rat is Dakota Fanning.
This rat is Glitter.
This rat is Sparkle.
This rat is James Bond.
This rat is Horse.
Would you like your rats in a bag?
Do you need special rat food?
You don’t need special rat food.
All food is rat food.
Give the rats all your food.
Bake ten thousand cakes
And give them to your rats.
Ten thousand cakes for ten thousand rats.
You can have ten thousand cakes or ten thousand rats.
How could you afford not to buy these rats?
All rats are twenty five percent off.
All rats are fifty percent off.
All rats are seventy five percent off.
All rats are free rats.
Take all of our rats.
That’s ten thousand rats.
We’ll ship the rats to your house.
We have special rat crates.
The special rat crates are made of Styrofoam.
Watch out for biting rats.
Biting rats may bite your other rats.
All rats are biting rats.
Please enjoy your rats.
This is from a poetry reading several months ago at Dan's Silverleaf. My delivery is flawless. You're welcome.


Sunday, January 23, 2011

Old People in the Future

Thirty years from now,
There will be old people who love rap music.
They will have no trouble with cell phones.
They will be on Facebook,
They will be pirating music and movies.
They will have video blogs.

There will be old people who skateboard,
Old people who smoke pot,
Old people who wear hipster glasses,
Old people who watch MTV,
Old people who vote democrat,
Old people who text each other.

But they will still have problems
Understanding symphonic hydropop music,
Operating quantum computers,
Installing cybernetic upgrades,
Hooking into holographic feeds,
And they will never use bio-electric telepathy.
Fruit Analogy

A Swedish scientist explains how a hadron collider
Smashes protons together to find new particles.
He holds out various fruits to help illustrate the process.
Here is the pear; the pear is a proton.
Here is the grape; the grape is a top qwark.
Here is a squash; the squash is a graviton.
I am a down’s syndrome boy learning long division,
And I feel his great cognitive strain to convey his ideas
In a way that regular people will understand.
His eyes glitter with secret knowledge,
The unfathomably colossal intellect,
The understanding shared only by super-geniuses.
Nations pour out their treasuries for men like him.
Architects and engineers devote their lives
To building massive mile long steel tunnels.
Cranes hoist structures the size of skyscrapers,
Install complicated scientific measuring devices,
Exert a trillion gigawatts of human ingenuity
To construct this stepping stone to total enlightenment,
And I watch this all on the television set
Alone in my parents’ upstairs living room,
Eating cupcakes and sipping an energy drink,
Wondering what poem I’ll write for my blog tonight.
There is a universe of thought you will never know,
And you are never as smart as you think you are.

Thursday, January 20, 2011

How to get free soda for life:

-Go to Chipotle.

-Buy a soda.

-Get a free refill.

-Get another free refill.

-Get another free refill.

-Never leave Chipotle.
Unicorn People

After the witch transformed us,
We lived as pearl white unicorns
Deep in the Tanzanian jungle,
Galloping alongside jaguars,
Impaling monkeys on our horns,
And drinking dew pooled in leaves.
One day we saw a dinosaur,
A brontosaurus grazing in the river.
Then he submerged and was gone.
We avoided the dancing singing natives,
But if one of them glimpsed us,
We stabbed him with our horns,
And drank his blood for nourishment.
We ran through a nebulous jungle dream,
Saw shimmering dark blue shapes,
Hazy mythic things rustling in the trees.

Then one day, the spell wore off.
Fleshy and nearly hairless, we returned
To our jobs in southern California
Where we waited tables at Chili’s.
Soon, the memory of being unicorns
Was washed away like a sandcastle,
And all we had was a skeletal image,
A vague outline of a shape of a dream,
And then there was barely even that.
We served chicken tenders and burgers
To chubby white people wearing ties,
We watched American Idol,
And washed our clothes at the Laundromat.
We stared into the mirror, confused, angry.
And this was all there was,
All there had ever been.
Football Fan

Sink deep in a leather recliner.
Steadily sip a can of Lone Star.
Breathe in cold air conditioning.
Watch physically anomalous men
Sprint like angry grizzly bears
In the scorching syrupy heat.
See their skin cry with sweat,
Their steely eyes beady with focus.
Deep fry a damn egg roll
While you peer at the TV.
Hope your team makes a comeback,
And then suddenly wolves,
Hundreds and hundreds of wolves,
An ocean tide of wolves spill
Out onto the field from every corner,
And they devour each player,
Rip their meticulously crafted muscles
Like nothing more than Buffalo wings.
No one can see their favorite player
Under the writhing furry mass,
And now the game is called.
No one wins.
Except me.
I hate football.

Wednesday, January 12, 2011

God's Judgment

One day, a man came up to heaven to be judged by God. The man had murdered a family of five with a steak knife, dismembered their bodies with large hedgeclippers, encased each of them in bathtubs full of cement, and then buried the bathtubs deep underground at a nearby quarry. There was no motive. The only reason police arrested him was because he filmed the whole thing and posted it on youtube. Needless to say, God looked at his list of sins, and was disappointed in his creation.

"You violated one of my commandments," said God. "Thou shalt not kill. You violated it five times. That's pretty bad. It looks like you're going to hell."

"Wait!" said the man. "Why should I go to hell? You created me, knowing that I would kill those people. You gave me the drive to murder people and took away my self-restraint."

"Yes, but everyone has free will," said God.

"Not if you know what's going to happen. Not if you set me on a path, knowing what I'm going to do."

"Okay, but--wait, I'm confused. What?"

"You gave me the personality flaws that led to me murdering people, so if anyone should go to hell, it should be YOU."

"Hmm," said God. "This is an interesting idea. I will have to think about this."

He stroked his long white beard, thinking long and hard. Then he grabbed the man with a whale sized fist, and gobbled him up.

"Nom nom nom," said God. "Nom nom nom nom nom nom nom nom nom nom nom nom nom nom nom nom nom nom nom nom nom nom nom nom nom nom nom nom nom nom nom nom yum."
I got a painting in the Big Mike's Coffeehouse Visual Art Exhibition. The reception is tomorrow at 7 PM at Big Mike's. My painting's the one with the black hole. It's called Black Hole. It'll be up for the next month. Your pupils will be like little black holes sucking in the image of my painting. SUCKKKKKKKKK.

Judgmental Dwarf

When I wake up in the morning,
I see a mean old dwarf hovering over me.
He’s chubby with a long white beard,
And he wears denim overalls and a purple hat.
“You are very ugly right now,” he says.
His beady black eyes cut into me.
“You should get out of bed,” he says.
As I brush my teeth,
He leans in close on the counter top,
His wrinkled face inches from mine.
“Your teeth are slightly yellow,” he says.
I make a bowl of fruit loops cereal,
And he examines it closely.
“What a lazy unhealthy breakfast,” he says.
His beard dips in the milk.
“Your cereal is hairy now,” he says.
“That’s disgusting.”
He sits in the passenger seat
While I drive to school,
His feet barely reach the seat’s edge.
“You left your blinker on,” he says.
“You drive like an old person.”
At school, he sits in the desk next to me,
Peering over at my exam scantron.
“Those answers are mostly wrong,” he says.
“You did not study enough, did you?”
I talk to a girl at a coffee shop,
And he cranes his neck to listen
Nearly tumbling out of his chair.
“You’re not very witty,” he says.
“She’s not going to have sex with you.”
At home, I curl up with a book to read.
He looks at the book’s title,
Licking his teeth and pursing his lips.
“That book received poor reviews,” he says.
“You have terrible taste in literature.”
As I fall asleep, he sits on my chest,
Listing my negative personality traits
And insulting my physical appearance.
Days pass, then weeks, then months,
And I stop getting out of bed in the morning.
I hide under the sheets and plug my ears.
I try to ignore the dwarf,
But I can feel his weight on my chest.
He’s waiting for me to do something,
Waiting for a glimpse of my face,
Waiting to judge me.

Monday, January 10, 2011


New Grocery Store

Have you seen the new grocery store
They just opened up by my house?
The outside is painted in Mardi Gras colors.
Their produce section has never before seen fruits
Like kangaberries, Dar Gar Mars, and Lizapoms.
The frozen food section is filled
With frozen clam pizzas and Manganese ice cream.
They have flea juice and radiohead cheese.
They have cockatoo heads and lizard blood.
They have human skin and pterodactyl breasts.
They have cakes the size of a high school gymnasium.
They have rocks and sand and ocean.
They have suns and moons and stars.
They have existential despair and Paul Giamatti.
They have dirty bombs and shotguns and biscuits.
They have your dead relatives, frozen, waiting for you.
It’s all there, all to buy, all discounted.
Here are some coupons from this morning’s paper.
You’re welcome.



I Will Eat My Own Face

Suddenly and without warning,
Rachel Ray took a steak knife
To the edge of her cheek bone,
 Sliced slowly vigorously across,
Cutting her own face off
Like her head was a block of cheese.
She had a calm facial expression.
Audiences thought it was CGI
Or some kind of practical joke.
Some of them laughed at it.

She placed her face on a cookie sheet
With aluminum foil underneath.
She sprinkled seasoning over it,
Salt, pepper, and Cajun spices.
Then she shoved it in the oven
And instructed us in a soft voice
To let it bake for fifteen minutes.
She tried to form a smile,
But she need not have bothered.
Skulls never stop grinning.

Cut to fifteen minutes later,
And she pulls her face out of the oven.
It looks like a generic lump of meat
With three holes and some mascara.
You’d never guess it was a face,
Maybe some sort of meat mask,
And now she puts it on a plate
With mashed potatoes and wine.
“I get so stressed,” she says to the camera.
“I mean, I just get so fucking stressed.”

Saturday, January 8, 2011

No More Redheads

There will come a day
When the last redhead dies,
The last strand blows away.

Regional accents will vanish.
No more pahk the cah
Or ain’t nuttin fer y’all.

Languages will disappear.
Small ones like Swahili.
Then big ones like German and French.

Skin colors will mix together
Into a shade of dull brown.
No more black or white people.

Finally whole countries will merge.
Boundaries between them will vanish
Or cease to be important.

And the media will celebrate
This great union of peoples,
The final stir of the stew.

But there will be no redheads.
They’ll all be dead.
And there won’t be any more.

Never Let Me Go

For two long hours
The only thought in my head
Is ‘Why don’t they fight back?’

They’re taking your organs
And you just go along with it?
What is wrong with you?

Attractive sad eyed English people
Roaming the picaresque countryside,
Whining about being donors.

Why don’t you organize a rebellion?
Kill those old people!
They’re trying to take your organs!

Instead you pose on the beach,
Looking deep and thoughtful
Like Urban Outfitters models.

Carrie Mulligan watches through glass
As surgeons cut out her friend’s organs.
Then she goes home.

I hope if you ever see someone
Cutting my organs out,
You would at least be like,

“Hey, don’t.”

Thursday, January 6, 2011

Malaise is Mental Mayonnaise

You want to believe you are important
That in a given day, you produce
Enough work to make that day worthwhile,
But you stop and read what you wrote
And it is Space Jam fan fiction.
The New Yorker will not accept it,
No matter how lush the language
Or how resonant Michael Jordan’s
Emotional and spiritual transformation
Over the course of five hundred pages.
So you sit in your rolly chair
And sip your Amp energy drink.
You eat some Christmas candy,
Chocolate Santas and peanut butter cups.
It makes you feel a little better.
You listen to The Go! Team on iTunes.
It makes you feel energetic and gung ho
About not doing anything.
You read a comic book on your computer
About Reed Richards building a spaceship.
He is so active, so productive,
It makes you feel like you’re being active
That you too are being productive,
But really, you’re just staring at jpegs.
You draw a funny drawing,
So you can say you did something,
But it is a terrible drawing,
And you do not want to claim it,
Do not want to show anyone the drawing.
You eat a bowl of picante chicken ramen.
That’s enough work for tonight, you think.
You go downstairs to bed.

Tuesday, January 4, 2011

A Poem About Sauce You're Welcome



The Sauce Palace

It’s all you can eat sauce
At the Sauce Palace all-day buffet:
Barbecue sauce, cocktail sauce,
Horseradish sauce, spicy chipotle sauce,
Chili sauce, mustard, and, ketchup
All spraying in arcs of brown, yellow, red
From the sightless eyes of stone deities
Like Buddha, Jesus, and Mohammad,
A sculpture fountain near the entrance,
And at the base of the fountain,
Children with plastic red buckets,
Scoop up the sauce with frantic glee,
And dump it into their gaping maws,
Guzzle it down their open throats,
Drink it in without pausing for breath,
And some of the kids are puking
But that’s okay, a normal occurrence
And the floor is coated with puke,
And sauce that’s dribbled from their mouths.
One boy dives into the pool of sauce,
Plunges deep below the surface
Into the lukewarm tangy stew,
Lets it all inside him all at once
And then drowns,
But even that’s normal, no big deal,
Not a concern, just calm down—
It’s the Sauce Palace,
And that’s how it goes.

My Most Important Post Yet

Evening Gown Made of Cake

Everyone stares enraptured.
She’s so beautiful tonight
In her gown made of cake.
Press close to her body,
Sniff her all over,
Oh God, she smells divine,
Like cherries dipped in cream.
Like vanilla frosting and pineapples.
They all want her phone number.
They want to eat her up,
Press their skin against the cake.
They want to dip their fingers in the frosting.

She’s so thrilled by the attention,
She wears the gown again the next day,
Wears it to school and to work,
Wears it for days, then weeks.
Then an entire month in the gown.
The cake is stiff and moldy,
Infested with bugs and worms,
Crunchy and juicy in the wrong places.
Why won’t she take off the dress?
The smell makes people sick.
Just take off the dress, they tell her.
People avoid her on the street.
Her friends stop calling her.
Change into a damn t-shirt and jeans!
Why won’t she take off the dress?
She’ll never take off the dress.

Sunday, January 2, 2011

First Post

The King’s Speech

Why do old people love
Watching movies about English royalty.
The Queen, Young Victoria,
And now the King’s Speech…

They forget these inbred people
Lead an entire country
Based on the credentials
Of “My dad was king”.

This is not one of those
Adorable national traditions.
These people represent a nation.
Don’t you fucking get it?

These are just regular people,
Dressed up like royalty,
And paraded in front of the masses
So that they always remember:

Your kings and queens,
Your movie stars and pop singers
Are more important human beings
Than you’ll ever be.