POETRY | Joeking

POETRY SAMPLES FROM HUMAN ANTS

WIND UP THE CRANK IN THE BACK

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Prescription notebooks leave corpses suspended

some doctors placing fifty bucks on heads.

Nurses remove stained sheets from plastic beds

rolling swollen eyes at the attended.

Waiting rooms sprawl the overextended

patient angel wings growing in the spreads.

Archways hang half price intestines in shreds

where a surgeon's covered cough ascended.

I crawled through a metal hole to your floor

and read the signs written in Pig Latin.

The hallways crossed sections like unmarked streets
when I heard something behind a closed door.

Two TVs argued silk over satin
as the nurses covered your face in sheets.

CARCASS OF MY YOUTH

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Some sort of simple wonder

of the radiating night

is floating around the outside

of my plain plexiglass window

Sneaking across the dirt encrusted

stairs where neighborhood children

had played when the man who turns

the mechanical press of the government

and heavens had allowed children

to play.

Somewhere that simple sort of wonder

is jostling for the joy you can't stand but

can't survive without.

Somewhere this wonder is a regret filled

smog that grows thicker with the factory

pollutants of every mismanaged life wasted

with television, sports, and political talking

figure heads.

It creeps through unbalanced.

A lost mechanism of our own confused

design.

Trying to get me to think

about lost loves and fiat money

about theoretical time and insomniac dreams

about humanity's crushed bones compressed

under the weight of

the earth

sunk to the bottom of

the ocean

blowing as ash in

the wind.

Some sort of simple wonder

of the radiating night

is trying to come inside

but there is only room

for one of us in here.

SANDWICH

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People are made from bologna

a crushed dream smoked inside

some summer sausage day house

now used to slaughter daughters

of the revolution.

I used to be a bug tucked into a smug

rug before I was gutted all the same.

Watched a little politician go to

the throne and the other boy to

a blind horseshoe game.

That was how we were pickle rolled

in the fashion factory with the sweet

sent of plastic pale pimentos

and parliament's new hairdo.

Don't you laugh.

I am the twist of free lemon in your

spitting image’s eye drink puckered

suckered and reeled into debts

stars and babies I didn't name

but grew to love.

A MOUTH IS FOR KISSING

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The fox and grapes and the humans

make love in rabbit cages.

A thorn in the eye of

Hammurabi's golden grin

plucked by a lion with the cloudless

wings of Constantine's heaven.

The Northwind and the Sun had a bet

but now the wind is blowing little

Sleeping Beauty's skirt over her head and the Sun

will only shine for the twisted skin

of Pluto's oral fetish.

Take apart the ant who had stored for

winter one leg at a time and rub each tiny

antenna until radio frequency IDs give a fireside

chat of the latest Martian invasion.

Here, in the nocturnal amateur horizon,

a man made of cheese smiles from above

knowing he is only desert and the imagination

of your gullibility. A trail of bread crumbs leads

the way to a damnation of dreams. Sleep well in the

mouth of a whale as real boys turn to puppets once

again. Now, hear the music of the piper go

in one ear and out of the office before the

noon whistle blows.

DR. FOGLIGHT

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Somewhere in the mist of that

wintered yellow

ball thumbing through the

corner of eyeless faces refusing to look up

sits that taunting hollowing old medic

swaying between crooked teethed livers spotted

with self-induced nightmares. Somewhere

in that mist the slow rock medic turns that half

beaten slanted brow and says how

show

how

can you not be well

I see two arms legs eyes tongue

there is a heart in a chest and it moves

with the bus stops and bullets and bicycles

and the busboys running back to sweep up

change and pocket the insides of your infected

moth bed sticky spiderweb seaweed. You should move

onward,

homeward, keep the price

in turn,