WALKEN: Are you pla-ying with poop old ma-n?
COLUMBO: It’s dirt.
WALKEN: How ca-n you be su-re?
COLUMBO: Who?
At that moment the groans from you, the audience, are unbearable. Tony Kushner, Eric Bogosian, Michael Jackson and Neil Simon, the writers, are in the wings. They stand up to halt this retarded boat wreck opera.
A tussle ensues onstage. It’s a bonafide melee. Simon is dead from
disconnecting his life support. Kushner is some kind of angelic ninja with pink triangular throwing stars. Michael Jackson is just shadowboxing and that is cool.
Bogosian grabs Walken in a half-nelson and says things you might hear in an action movie, like:
Feel the fever bitch! You deface my play, you
face death. You look hungry. You need a ham sandwich!
Michael Jackson says:
You mean knuckle sandwich, my Buddy. Did my baby walk away? I was boxin’.
I yell out:
I WANT OUT!
Vawoosh.
The theatre goes black. No more heartbeat. Mr. Jackson retreats. With every step he takes, a patch of ground lights up that leads the way out of the nightmare, very similar to the Billie Jean video. The theater patrons follow him out the doors that are, of course, shaped like a vagina and instead of exit at the top it says Happy Birthday. Isn’t that nice?
Remorph.
Back to the real bar. Real time. The Red Room. All that stuff Columbo taught
me about true strength and inner peace dies the moment I see you.
The humans want to be touched.
He’s got you.
And so begins the war of the haves and
the have-nots.
You must not get me wrong. I am not the brokenhearted cliché.
I am the cliché of the critic who can’t hide his jealousy.
You both smell like hotel soap. White soap. Stiff towels. Didn’t even unfold the v shape on the toilet paper.
In comes chaos theory. You smartypants know what that is. One small thing affects other things, dollface. How could you ignore this?
I am dealing with you and him in an adult manner.
I think it’s time I blew up your night with a warm greeting.
As I approach you are leaning over to him and flirting saying:
I like my movies like I like my men…long and confusing.
That’s my cue.
I greet you.
I greet him.
I drop my keys.
I drop my keys so I can spit on his shoes.
I miss.
Not everyone is built for success.
Some are built to get close to winning and
sometimes that feels like winning so ha ha! Goodnight lovebirds. Go get the
worm.
Your shoes have paint on them. You have been painting vigorously. You would paint your shoes instead of buying new ones. I liked that. We were poor. Our clothes were old. This paint is new like your tennis bracelet. I coulda made one for you. I could learn to forge metal. It can’t be that hard.
I back off. He’s kissing you like you were free sushi. Please be decent.
There was a time when I held you so tight I thought I was alone. We made love in the strangest season and in the morning you said:
Thank you for the night.
As if I owned it. You made me feel like I did. I felt like handing it over to you.
I thought of things that take apart things.
Tweezers, screwdriver, crowbars and such.
I began breathing hard.
I have made my way out to the parking lot. It seems like I can never get out
here. As if I had been inside this bar since I was a boy. I write you a letter and post it
on the telephone pole above all the other lost animals.
It said:
dear blank and gray shape—
let me come to your wedding.
I’ll bring the bouquet.
It will be made out of lead
which is insanely more apropos.
Down the aisle
when you hold it close to your heart
you’ll feel something heavy
and when you toss it at the reception
over the junglesnow of your dress
instead of people struggling to reach for the symbol
of falling in love next
they will run
for it will come down on them
like shrapnel fleschettes.
and it will nail some of your relatives in their heads
and they will fall unconscious
and wake up and forget who they are
and I’ll be standing there dressed in a rented cupid costume
saying this is love. you’re bleeding. walk it off, sissies.
Hot damn. I knew love once. It was my savior.
Sometimes we murder our saviors.
from HOSTILE PENTECOSTAL
HOUSTON INTERNATIONAL
This poem actually happened at the airport in Houston. I smiled like an idiot the whole plane ride home from my father’s house. (Emu poem) I was so amazed, with all the weirdos out there, that someone would let their kids smooch a total stranger. I’m glad they did.
Two nine-year-old girls ran up to me
when I was sitting in the airport,
gave me kisses on my cheeks,
sandwiched me
and ran back to their parents.
Tiny mercenaries.
I watched them giggle.
They ‘got me’ and asked no questions.
Awkwardly shaped girls giggle hard and red-faced.
They re-circulate the air in my plane and it is torture.
Someone is wearing my lover’s old perfume and it hits me every three minutes.
I ask the stewardess for playing cards, ginger ale and duct tape.
I go to light up in the lavatory,
tape up the doorjamb
and imagine lighting up until my skin soaks up the smoke.
People bang on the door
staining their good breeches.
Good.
They don’t understand
how your scent
assassinates the day.
But
Your blasting-cap black-eyed romance
Your belladonna body
Your ineffable lust
is nothing
compared to the unforgettable rush
of a coupla giggling nine-year old-girls.
from THE JOY MOTEL
SUGARFREE NATIVITY
This actually happened at my pal Tim Scott’s house with Jason Whitton and I doing the sneaking of Jesus.
Since we’re on the topic of nativity scenes for your front lawn, I must
say that I don’t like them. Mannequins don’t glow for a reason, cause it’s
creepy. I like the small, defeatable nativity scenes that fit on a mantel and
have no chance of chasing you in dreamland.
My mother prefers a paper plate and green coconut shreds that
symbolize grass.
She knows where to get edible green coconut. You get a pamphlet on
that kind of stuff when you reach fifty-one years of age. Her scene isn’t
glory struck in lights and plastic, but rather bright candy. The stuff you look at.
The kind that makes kids on Halloween pissed and burning-caca-bag
prone.
She turns that unwanted candy into glory. Go ahead, all that crap you
bought your mothers, the apron that said Best mom ever, the plaque that
said Greatest mother in the world, you can go ahead and take those down
now that we have a champion. Her name is Nancy.
It’s not just candy to her. It’s construction of Biblical history. I would
eat this Biblical history as a kid ‘cause no one told me there was superglue
on the back of each piece but so what? I turned out O.K.
/> The barn is made of graham crackers. A lemon drop for a star. I don’t
remember Mary and Joseph. They might have been Almond Joy and
Mounds. That’s right. I remember they were candy bars cause they looked
black and delicious. Plenty of animal crackers balanced in the cream waves
of frosting.
She says it’s snow and I believe her and I wonder if it snows in Israel.
Then I wonder if Jesus was born in Israel.
Then I remembered that Myrrh was a gift and it was also something
Egyptians used to stuff in mummy guts. Merry Christmas.
The three wise men:
a red swirled restaurant mint,
a purple bon-bon
and a yellow gummy bear.
She says he’s the one bearing gold. Now you know where it comes from.
What puts me in aftershock is that my Mother, the Willy Wonka’d God of
this world of meticulous frosting and hidden superglue, has made the baby
Jesus, the one in swaddling clothes, whatever those are, out of a Sour Patch
Kid and a pink roll of taffy. A pink roll of taffy when everyone knows that blue
is for boys and pink is for girls. I told her pastor on her.
How could I do such a thing?
First of all you don’t mess with the baby Jesus.
The baby Jesus is important. An Italian lady taught me that.
“Don’t touch the baby Jesus!” My friend Tim has a mom and she’s Italian.
She has a porcelain baby Jesus and whenever we’d go to his house, we would
turn it a little on the coffee table and she would come in with terror in her
jaw when she radared in on that slight sound of porcelain creeping on glass
and say “Who turned the baby Jesus?”
We would all stare at each other confused and dumb until I piped up:
“Why do you have the baby Jesus turned like that, Mrs. Scott?”
And she would scream at us “So he can watch the T.V. you morons!
Don’t touch the baby Jesus!” Tim would say “But this movie is rated R and it’s
got Bill Murray in it.”
“Well, Jesus loves Bill Murray too. Now put Jesus back the way he was. Oh,
for the love, I’ll do it. Next time, don’t touch the baby Jesus. You’ll break his
little head off. “
And you know what friends, we did break his little head off. Not on pur-
pose. It was a sacrilegious act and I am truly ashamed of it. Grown men and
women should know better than to play spin the bottle with the baby Jesus
figurine. It seemed like the years of backsliding, murder and all-out sin that
followed were all a part of some prophecy. Learn from this tale my friends.
Never, ever, ever mess with the baby Jesus.
YOU CAN FEEL NEEDED IN A CASINO WITH ONLY A HUNDRED-POUND BAG OF SODIUM-FREE PRETZELS
This was originally called Pechanga and was written for the talented Los Angeles writer Ellyn Maybe. She wears a lot of purple and tape-records every poetry show she goes to and then doesn’t label the cassettes and loses them. I think she is fantastic. She loves Billy Jack and vinyl records. I could imagine her detonating a casino from just stepping inside and being wonderful.
The Pechanga casino is a bright blue shoebox
full of Thursday night bingo boots
bawdy belt-buckled cowboys
and heavy alliteration.
Here are the new cowboys:
whoreless
sober
and filtered lights
suburbanites surrounded by neon
spilling across the slots
careful to not kick up dirt from the parking lot.
Indoorsmen.
Overweight.
Charming and unloved.
Rows and Rows of them.
Rub-cuss-begging the prom queen shine machines.
Silver New Mexican turquoise belt buckles
tink-tapping the rims of the chrome slot trays.
A Morse code beggin’ for cash mercy.
I pulled up in a dirty Honda,
full of trash and a 100-pound bag of sodium-free pretzels.
It’s true. They were a gift.
I merge to blackjack.
The dealer’s breath is dead children and boxed wine.
A table littered in flipped rainbow chips.
the colors change in the dealer’s mood ring
from sorrow to licorice black.
His hands hover above the velvet.
Chips slip through my fingers like the Eucharist.
My chip appears to be lightly vibrating like a dying joy buzzer.
I can feel the hands of all who had held this chip before me:
The soft hands of a bored policeman,
The sweat in an alcoholic’s fingers,
The slice in an elderly woman’s golf grip.
I hit and I fold more than an origami factory.
Every hand lost.
Dealer says:
Pechanga wasn’t build on nickel slots and winners.
Maybe its not such a good idea to hit on 20.
I make my lame stand.
“What in the name of the Great Spirit
is up with this bum-ass table?”
A bomb of silence
like an anti-Semitic joke in Canter’s Deli.
The manager screamed:
“Big Shoe. Airplane Noise. Get him!”
I leeched my body around the Big Bertha five-dollar slot and bellied:
“Noo! I am a quarter Choctaw. We made fancy baskets.
I deserve a cut of your profits and I am not leaving ‘til I get it!”
“Get him out of here. He’s not even wearing boots.”
I chanted Pine Ridge and that I belong everywhere.
They chanted “Reservations!” Double meaning.
I chanted “Billy Jack will come to avenge me
like Jesus flipping out and turning tables in the temple.
Billy Jack, Billy Jack.”
They chanted “Jackpot!”
Then a hush fell over the crowd.
BWWIIZZAP!
An electric snap surged through the ground.
Something moved under the trailer.
A hum began to stir upon the velvet tables,
a buzzing like the one I felt in my single chip.
The rum-and-new-carpet odor began to dissipate.
The smell of cooked earth rising.
Glimmer static and drum rolls.
In every machine,
in the pocket of every cowboy and pit boss,
the chips began to murmur,
Richter shake and crawl.
A sound like Hefty bags of teeth on vibrating hotel beds
was growing louder and louder.
Then the chips zipped and burst into the air.
Beautiful rainbow tracers
splitting from tight denim pockets
cleaving and ripping light trails from the cashier’s tray
melting the bills
shredding the ceiling stucco into sparks
deep into the sky
never stopping
crashing into comets
tearing into satellites
cell phones exploded
and lovers in Riverside kissed under the fireworks.
Among the quiet rubble of the stunned casino
the pit boss smiled at me and said,
“Did you do that?”
I said, “No. I can’t cowboy up like that.”
“Well, now what are we gonna gamble with?”
I said, “I have some pretzels.”
He said, “No thanks. Too much sodium.”
Aha.
AMAZING JIM NUMBER NINE AND SEVEN
This is the first poem I ever wrote that I really felt good about, in 1994. I performed in it 1998 at the Austin Music Hall. I have neve
r heard a thousand people stay perfectly still. I also felt like an ass for shaking so hard from being nervous.
I’m 23. She’s 25.
When you lay on your back, your voice sounds different.
I feel like a cloud.
Oh. I’ve made a woman giddy. Talkative. Abierto.
She used to get her hairspray confused with her deodorant.
How supermarket-hygiene-aisle-Braziliant her locks would smell
And how salon-style-sticky her clean American armpits would feel.
I hear her worlds like a toddler
with floaties
bobbling in blue illuminated night pool.
Sticky…
Uncomfortable but still…
I could never…
Horse glue…
Clumsiest bike…
Something about how she could never do this trick
where you throw your kickstand down as you roll to a stop.
She said she fell like a heavy pancake,
like Jenga in slow-mo.
Lips movin’ arms goin’ throwin’ her kickstand down.
At this point I think of a slow hollow sound.
I didn’t bring all this home.
Those pop metaphors.
Those Aquanet armpits.
Those kickstand fingers flicking my chest.
I lay inches from beautiful bedhead
Moonshining hair
500,000 filaments burning.
I cannot cuddle with someone’s history.
It takes the anonymity away.
Like hearing a magician’s real name.
Like seeing a clown without make-up.
Like honest touch.
How can you hold that.
How could these skinny arms hold all that?
All her clumsy history is kicking my ass.
She pinches my elbow skin.
She says, Amazing. There’s no nerves there.
I say, Amazing, I can’t feel a thing.
What is the name of that perfect nerve
that tells your eyes to shut tight when pain approaches?
Jim.
Amazing Jim, the magician.
Eyes synchronize shut and now I am no longer here.
No longer bobbling and floating.
Steady. Running.
Running alongside her.
Slowing her down by gripping the back of the banana seat.
Throw your kickstand down… now!
And we fall
We fall together
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