Just before its butchering

Just when you think
he seeks something normal,
he screams, “Jesus. Oh, God!”
and violently applies
a box of crayons to paper
set upon a hot plate.

Or is that the middle
and this piece seeks a beginning
and, in time, an end?

It could be the fishheads
are something she steers into,
confusing them with fishtails
as the car glides past the ice
filled cart at the open air market.

No matter how hard
my foot hits the floor,
I am the passenger
and the breaks don’t engage,
so my eyes widen
and I brace myself,
but the car comes
to a stop just short
of the curb.

It tastes like middle to me,
and no amount of typing
will bring it to the end or find
a start this far down the page.

What can you do, but stop reading,
because nothing from this point on
makes much sense—

keep between elbow wrestles
crossed block sidewalk gaps
heaviness like your empty bells
burlap stucco light bulbs
lurid animal sweet hips goodbye

just before its butchering.

- Kenneth P. Gurney

U.S. Golden Rule Prayer

Dear lord grant us
five hundred pound bombs
and laser guided missiles
dropping from the sky
upon our neighborhoods.

Grant us midnight rendition
commando teams stealing
our local leaders.

Grant us electroshock treatment
and water boarding.

Grant us sleep deprivation
and hunger.

Grant us occupiers who ignore
the Geneva Convention on a whim,
on an order from the administration.

Grant us roadside fanatics
who destroy each others’ churches.

Grant us foreign soldiers on our streets
who kill indescrimently whenever
gang members harm anyone.

Grant us predator drones
above our cities and towns
and hell fire missiles
launched remotely from a man
peering endless hours into a TV screen.

Grant us IEDs and market place
truck bombs.

Grant us collateral damage:
childen’s body parts on street corners,
weddings showed by gunship fire,
families gunned down by checkpoints
guards.

Grant us an economy in ruins
and the graft and greed and corruption
of foreign companies.

- Kenneth P. Gurney

The light, darling. The light.

The woman standing
outside the thirteenth floor window
of an office building in Albquerque,
thinks she is in a Magrite painting,
fears the wind will take away her bowler,
believes cartoons are as real as reality
and that lack of belief
is just as strong as belief.

She does not feel it is her fault
that traffic is tied up for blocks
and emergency vehicles blare sirens,
that lights flash patriotically
and there are professional people
speaking at her from the window.

The view of the mountains and the river
is better from this vantage point
than from her windowless cubical
and the bird songs are far lovelier than her boss
who does not know how to say thank you.

In fact, this is a good place for a picnic
and she wishes her children
and her three ex-husbands would join her,
can’t understand why the deli
won’t deliver, as she has a taste for slaw.

The birds, she realizes, are too attached
to the notion of gravity and create
as big a flap as the fretting professionals,
but there are rain drops rising past her face
and she takes comfort in that sort of beauty.

She is hungry now, like Eve, takes the apple
of her eye from its traditional place
and eats it, consumes in twelve different ways
all the words of the apostles, even Bartholemew,
but not Mathias.

Finally, her daughter, in Paris, sets the paintbrush
in the tin of turpentine, wipes her hands clean
and goes to a corner cafe
for a glass of wine and whatever
the cook will whip up this close to midnight.

- Kenneth P. Gurney

HISTORY TAPS ITS FINGERS

History taps its fingers,
keeps geologic time,
waits for the next ice age
so it can sweep
all our technology shit
under the long carpet
of snow.

- Kenneth P. Gurney

MEMORY OF MIDDLE IOWA, CHICAGO, ILLINOIS

It begins at the Trek convention
with the slim girl in the diaphanous blouse
who arrived with the conclusion:
this is the best place to get
the most guys in bed over a weekend.

Her rapture turns into a song
echoed down the hotel’s hallways
and is taken up as the new theme
for a boys-grown-old club
where, for twenty hours,
some guys think they are special.

But the numbness
that invades a marriage
dampens the thunder of orgasms,
until, really, it might as well
be the cough of a passer-by.

And elsewhere there is a guy—
a husband—struck by lightning,
as he puts the pieces together
from the convention blogs
after his business meetings.

She continues to walk
through the dark and dizzy nights
where the cliff-face is at hand
and, perhaps, she’ll fall off—
if not at the convention,
then when she gets home
to learn that it is now a house
with a broken furnace.

- Kenneth P. Gurney

WHITE SANDS

This is how I cut myself open
—dream a dream that I can’t quite make real, then
the wounds open from within and I fall

into my blood that collects in an open clamshell,

fall into moist bone
exposed by the ocean

that washes away the mountains I made,

fall into the shapes of extinct animals
that reside in the calcified rockface stripped bare,

and the night is the undertow that tears my flesh away
as easy as sand from this beach.

- Kenneth P. Gurney

Passionate Nowhere

My exhaustion originates
in burying dreams.

The boneyard is full of white stone.
It paves the streets of this small town

where the gas station is closed
forever plus a day.

What propulsion will send me
out of here, when the threat of rain

blocks the sky?

- Kenneth P. Gurney

Quarterly Bukowski Moment

You don’t know what it is like to be Spiritual
until you’ve climbed to the mountain top
and received instructions directly from God.

That’s how it should be for everyone, everywhere.
Some ordeal, like climbing a mountain,
or running through a thousand meters of flaming petrol,
or watching every episode of Gilligan’s Island in a row,
before you can wear the I’m Spiritual brand.

And I’m not talking about things like dying on the cross.
Dying is fucking easy. Living is hard. Do the nine to five
and come home and truly love your kids
through all their whining before their homework gets done
and find out what TV crap their watching, then turn the damn thing off.
Find the ef-fing morale courage to stand up to that bully cop
who thinks his tin shield gives him license
to baton beat the weed smoking, dread-lock neighbor fuck-up you hate so much
for encouraging his dog to shit on your well manicured lawn.

And don’t give me any New Age sweat lodge bull shit, either.
The only sweating that counts Spiritually is at the wrong end
of a nasty, blue-steel gun barrel, when you know you probably
have to take one for the team. And, you know, that in-the-hospital sweat
counts, too. Especially when you sit next to your motorcycle child
who is hooked up to wires and tubes and beepy-things
in that fancy, mechanical, hospital bed.

By the way, I don’t give a God damn rat’s ass
about the every-Sunday-go-to-church folks
who don’t give a flying fuck every other hour of the week.
That includes Oral Roberts and Pat Robertson
and every other well monied, TV evangelist, sin raking S.O.B.
They couldn’t fill a flee’s thimble with true Spirit
and no self respecting, on the job, Saint Peter
is letting them go anywhere but down.

So you don’t know what it’s like to be Spiritual.
You haven’t climbed to the mountain top, yet.
And I don’t mean any prissy Colorado fourteen.
I mean the heaven scratching Himalayas
where there are the ice preserved carcasses
of your failed predecessors, littering the way up
to God’s wondrous vocal cords.

- Kenneth P. Gurney

This is the leg-lift century
for all the bodies that wish
a figure as slim as a cloud
of blue smoke.

At the far end of the room
stand the people who lost
their left shoe.

I fail to recognize the names
delivered by the news anchor.
In this test of relevancy,
the horses in the barn I clean
defeat congress.

This is not tragedy or comedy,
just a little girl playing in the mud
and tomorrow is laundry day—
all our lost prayers collect
in the lint filter.

Hope is as sinister as the man
flapping his arms on the rooftop,
but this is the leg-lift century
and the world refuses
to spit him into the clouds.

The girl who forgets to weep
for her lost hat, fails to paint the sun
yellow in her desire for a truer shade,
a color Pantone released as a free agent
before the new season started.

Though I executed as many leg-lifts
as my body managed before exhaustion
stopped the sunset, my love, spread too thin,
proved insufficient to lift the layers of fog
from the many harbors where the living
weep for the dead waiting for the ride
of their new lives.

- Kenneth P. Gurney

not titled

Thunder over the desert
punctuates the runoff,
the flash fiction
of sandy arroyos
bursting with water,
the tenuous grip
of my hand
on an inkless pen.

- Kenneth P. Gurney

More Real

Delphi wishes to translate
from muse to person,
from thought to flesh.What novel character
wouldn’t want to write
their own lines, make
a racket, a stink, a life real
entering the field of time.I’d like to show her
how to part the curtain
behind my eyes, but
that well worn path of light
flows in. So, somehow,
she needs to work her way
to my breath and traverse
the tumble of air
that goes both in and out.Yes, that is it. Breath.
Like God placed into the ash
and dust. Mine into
ink and page.

- Kenneth P. Gurney

Standings

This morning I found
my favorite baseball team
fell from first, spinning
like a plane with one wing.The empty icebox yawns
a cavernous stagnation.The detritus of dead flies
waits for the vacuum
at the store, displayed
on the shelf in a box
so that I might purchase
the thought of cleanliness.In grease pencil, I draw
a scoreboard and bleachers
on the killing window
in the dream of Wrigley Field
and a youth spent shagging
fly balls in Chicagoland.One of the bugs
still has some buzz left,
vibrates on the wood
where the paint flakes,
sill weathered by water
that blows through
the slanted frame.I must go to the grocery,
sometime. Today. Maybe.

Or, at least, get a piece of newsprint—
the sports page I read—
with which to lift the dream
of rising flight off its back
and return it to the outdoors.

- Kenneth P. Gurney