Live Nude Poems

I don't have much going poem-wise. I'm prepping two books right now, my collection of stories that will be out soonish, and my novel (endlessly), whose ending I'm rewriting and whose polishing will take forever if I let it. It's been two years now since I 'finished' it. I hope it's worth doing. Anyway, as promised, a poem I've probably linked before, from Girls with Insurance . How Terror Might Work for John Smith, IT Guy With the formless voices that bitch in his ear! Instructions: cap your appearance off with a balaclava. No one but the people on the mask's other side will know. True terror does not require identity revelation; otherwise one might set goals for vengeance in one's yearly situation report. This year was very poor for Terror Investors LLC: little Jimmy from next door escaped our 23-hour-vigil, lived to ram candy into sister Suzy's cute dark hair; Mama had to cut it off. George at the office moved to a corn...

photo by Amer Shomali This must be a popular poem--it's all over the internet, but I found it via Tom Clark (thanks). Between Rita and my eyes There is a rifle And whoever knows Rita Kneels and prays To the divinity in those honey-colored eyes And I kissed Rita When she was young And I remember how she approached And how my arm covered the loveliest of braids And I remember Rita The way a sparrow remembers its stream Ah, Rita Between us there are a million sparrows and images And many a rendezvous Fired at by a rifle Rita's name was a feast in my mouth Rita's body was a wedding in my blood And I was lost in Rita for two years And for two years she slept on my arm And we made promises Over the most beautiful of cups And we burned in the wine of our lips And we were born again Ah, Rita! What before this rifle could have turned my eyes from yours Except a nap or two or honey-colored clouds? Once upon a time Oh, the silence of dusk In the morni...

I'm slow to discover nearly everyone, I'm finding. Like David Bottoms. I admire the beard. Shooting Rats at the Bibb County Dump by  David Bottoms Loaded on beer and whiskey, we ride to the dump in carloads to turn our headlights across the wasted field, freeze the startled eyes of rats against mounds of rubbish. Shot in the head, they jump only once, lie still like dead beer cans. Shot in the gut or rump, they writhe and try to burrow into garbage, hide in old truck tires, rusty oil drums, cardboard boxes scattered across the mounds, or else drag themselves on forelegs across our beams of light toward the darkness at the edge of the dump. It's the light they believe kills. We drink and load again, let them crawl for all they're worth into the darkness we're headed for.

Somebody likes me! Three poems worth: Parkinsonism; Sonnet for So and So; Hollywood Appalachian Noir: A Lesson.