This isn’t even a poem really, it’s more a thesis, an antithesis, a treatise, Armageddon in two hundred & fifty words or less, it’s meaningless, bereft, out of credit. All this word junk you get to collect on scraps of paper, other people’s business cards, beer coasters, hollow lines without companions, verse on crutches hobbling toward anonymity central. What the hell do you do with them? Me, I chuck them onto social networking sites so they can float away on the void and maybe hitch up with some degenerative mind surfing the waves looking for redress, absolution, a juncture, I’m a doctor I realise now, late in the afternoon of my life as the kids set up a ball game out on the grass. I never liked kids anyhow, a cliché, suck it in it’ll do you good. The first thing I found was the line ‘Caucasian Sky Lifts’, I mean, what the shit does that mean? I was sitting there twirling a swizzle stick, the ice in the absinthe slowly melting, reminding me of Tyler’s cave in Fight Club, then for whatever reason I turned it into ‘Under pretty Caucasian skies’, yes, the juice was on and the current was pulsing through me – warmly. But where to go with it? ‘Turned on the lathe of mercantile credit’ sprung into my head like a randy hare, it made a connection, jumped a synapse with gay abandon, two dykes came into the bar – my mind went blank. I watched them engage in social intercourse and mimic binary protocols to a tee. Fascinating, ‘belltower rains silence onto mescaline sidewalks’, okay, I can go with that, the day is already crotchety and haggard, must have been thinking about that guy in Texas someplace, mass murderers can pop into the conscious any old time. Back to the dykes – oh look, ‘in the barrio they sit / clinking glasses with manufactured friends’, I’d started slashing. Juxtapose death, it’s beginning to become a waking dream, but now I have it by the nuts and it’s got nothing to do but scream the bitchy little poem. Time passes, then returns to ensure I was watching it pass, ‘thinking like Sunday papers/ guardians of democracy’, something from a recently read biography, lines stick in my head, words unglue me, sentences are handed out like free syringes in a drug bank. Flash dance mentally to a just watched movie, one eye on the roustabout dykes, ‘denouncing Kierkegaarde’s stance & Gross’s ideology’, would they even know who that was referencing and why or am I passing judgment? Probably, I’m prone to generalisations, nonetheless the slipstream is slipping, ‘Surplus of imagination comes with penury & jumper cables’, oh, okay, that’s a smidgin left field, very Freud, very Dada, heads on sticks with jumper cables attached – am I back to murder one? Pull myself together mentally, the poetry filly is bolting through Laura Ingalls meadow, papa is beckoning, shotgun concealed behind back. The first rule of Fight Club is . . . ‘leap tall buildings & locomotion: strap in for harness free adult entertainment,’ certainly not that. But I have had harness free adult entertainment on my mind a lot, maybe it appertains to an electric chair, I’m prone to penning death poems whereas Dylan Thomas’s oeuvre consisted almost totally of childhood reminisces, we all bite the hand that feeds. Oh yes, the dykes, well, they’re off, off to a vet to get de-sexed and flea bathed. Now, I’m watching the bar girl wash glasses with the faux interest of a chicken at a wake. ‘Sliding down the urethra to moulded-plastic logistics.’ Uh, what the toss is a urethra? The bar girl glances at me, I look away; I have a phobia about chicks holding tea towels. ‘One girl fists another in a bus station toilet,’ well okay, the tangent is established, the route marker set in stone, all mpt at poetic justice abandoned, back to the sex. Obviously I’m referencing the dearly departed dykes, or imagining what they’re up to, there’s a bus terminal not far away. ‘First thought gets western unionized,’ there’s the biblical interlude all you Jesuit’s were hanging out for. ‘Rock star leaps from bridge’ a Richey Manic name drop (no pun intended) ‘poet jumps from aft of ship,’ rapidly heel-snapped by a dip into Hart Crane’s tragic demise (pun intended), and they’re . . . off – and now we’d need a little bit of Ian Curtis me thinks and hey presto ‘idea hangs itself on laundry line’ Voila! But those jabs won’t stop coming and suddenly the faucet is on full bore and I can’t get me no emergency plumber ‘bride jilts herself for televised bliss,’ argh what the jack . . . ‘collection ends in fraudulent identity crisis,’ damn I’m referencing myself again ‘parable consumes the inferno,’ subliminal Dante? Someone please turn this shit off because believe it or not ‘I just write the fucking words lady, I don’t underwrite them.’ And that was how it was done, I finished my dregs, folded up the paper and left, surprisingly, it was dark outside and I was stone cold sober.
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