

"His work reasserts the belief that all writers try to keep believing: What we write on the page can become an agent of change."
Welcome to Books by Joe King
POETRY SAMPLES FROM HUMAN ANTS
WIND UP THE CRANK IN THE BACK
-
All rights retained by Joe King
​
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
-
All rights retained by Joe King
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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All rights retained by Joe King
​
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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All rights retained by Joe King
​
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
-
All rights retained by Joe King
​
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,
but you just say ah, don't you?