Odobenus rosmarus
(The Walrus)
“I told you about the walrus and me-man
You know that we're as close as can be-man.
Well here's another clue for you all,
The walrus was Paul.”
The fading 60s legend sheds his skin
Wriggling the scarred leathery flesh
Down past his shoulders.
Once his arms are free it goes faster.
The thick wrinkled hide
Comes off like a wetsuit
Which I suppose, in a way,
It is. He spreads the mysterious skin
Upon the moon-lit sand
Like a camper
Preparing to roll his sleeping bag
Into as tight a package as possible
Which he does, but first the tusks
Hanging like monstrous fangs
From his upper jaw.
He grips first the left in both hands,
Unseats it with a practiced jiggle.
The right takes a bit more work
Before it too slides out
With a soft wet sucking sound.
The roots go deep.
Now's the worst bit,
Yanking out the stubborn
Quill-thick whiskers drooping
Over his mouth.
Even with near threescore years
Worth of practice, he can't help
Whimpering with the agony.
But he can't shave this moustache
It needs be plucked by hand
For that is the nature
Of the Selkie-folk's inborn
Magic: pain and loss.
He rolls his tusks and Whiskers
Inside his fin-footed skin
Binds it with some dried seaweed
And rises to his feet the man
We all think we know
Sadness lurking deep in his watery eyes.
- Max Earl Blair
(featured in the poetry forum 08.30.08)
FOX VS. EVERYBODY
NYC—Fox News is not news according to a lawsuit filed today in Federal Court.
Everybody Who’s Still Got Two Functioning Brain Cells to Rub Together Inc. an internationally incorporated New York based Non-profit organization filed the suit on behalf of “Ourselves, our children, and the very institutions of Truth and Integrity.”
Alleging actual damages of $4.452 billion dollars, which is the annual operating income of News Corp., the parent company of the Fox Entertainment Group and its subsidiary Fox News Channel, the suit also demands that News Corp. cease and desist any association the corporation has with the word, “news.”
Citing as evidence the slogan, “Fair and Balanced Reporting,” as well as the reports of “a terrorist fist-jab,” and that the nation of Iran is, “16 or 17 days,” from developing a nuclear weapon, the suit claims that Fox News, the Fox Entertainment Group, the parent company News Corp., and News Corp. chairman and child raping neo-nazi fucktard Rupert Murdoch, “have committed incalculable harm to the overall level of informed persons the world over.”
“Everybody Who’s Still Got Two Functioning Brain Cells to Rub Together knows full-well that Fox News is not ‘news’ even under the loosest definition of the term, but instead is the propaganda arm of the illegally unelected kakistocracy of anti-president George W. Bush and the right wing of his Republican Guard,” said lead attorney Dewey Cheatham, long-time employee of the ACLU and other Communist backed or at least Communist inspired causes. “Everybody knows and we intend to prove this in open court by a clear preponderance of the evidence.”
“Free Speech is a sacred right, but when unsubstantiated opinion is reported as fact and administration-directed propaganda is reported as news, we all suffer. The air of legitimacy pollutes our own air and its very existence makes us all that little bit stupider,” Cheatham said. “We demand that Fox News stop calling itself ‘news.’”
Federal Judge Buford C. Kissdrivel, a former Liberty University theology professor who does not hold a law degree, who was a 2004 Bush appointee confirmed on a straight party-line vote of 49-51, will hear the case and decide based on its merits.
- Max Earl Blair
(added 08.13.08)
MISSED OPPORTUNITY
Christopher, mystic Christopher
Is reading stuff
About creating the Taliban
Back during the Reagan years.
He’s just getting into it,
When my bladder starts talking to me.
“Dude, I’m full,” my bladder says.
I try to ignore him,
But then my bladder
starts singing
Singin’ in the Rain.
I’m the only man in Dallas
Who has an asshole bladder.
So I get up, walk past
Christopher, mystic Christopher
Go out the door, across the hall,
And hit the head.
I unzip, extract, and look down.
The last guy didn’t flush.
Under the bright blue florescent light,
The pissy water is a sickly green.
A colony of bubbles congregates
Densely at the waters’ head
Two larger bubbles in the middle become eyes
And the colony deteriorates
Looking like tentacles at the bottom
Completing the image
Of the face of
MIGHTY CTHULU.
I see the face of Mighty Cthulu,
High Priest of the Sleepers Beyond
In the pissy waters of an unflushed urinal.
Of course it starts to talk to me.
“Hey man,” says Old Squid-Face,
The Devil Jones, the Grim Peacemaker,
“It’s all gonna be all right all right.”
“Listen to me and I’ll give you the key to Life Itself
And You will Rule the World.”
But I really gotta piss.
And so I obliterate the face of Mighty Cthulu
In a torrent of rushing piss,
Flush him away, shake and zip and wash my hands,
Go back to the bar and order another drink.
- Max Earl Blair
(added 08.03.08)
HIS EL CAMINO
Jesuchristo es el camino
—seen on the back of a minivan in Lakewood
2/28/2004
Jesus drives an El Camino.
You’d think His ride would be something
A little more eco-friendly
Like a Prius,
Or a minivan,
Instead of a ‘70s muscle car
With a Chevy big block
350 cubic inch V-8
Whose only saving grace is
Its having been gene spliced
With a pickup truck’s
Utility.
But Jesus prefers a vehicle
He can work on his own self
In his garage.
Jesus loves his El Camino.
It’s a real carpenter’s ride.
Jesus paid $595 for
His El Camino
At a Mason’s lodge auction
Ten years ago.
The odometer read 00777.9
(the number of the beast upstairs
(and across the hall)
But probably, that orignal ole big block V-8
Had 100,777.9
Or even 200,777.9 miles on it.
For a big block Chevy
That means it’s just now well broke in.
Jesus has put at least twice
His purchase price
Into that El Camino.
Most of it in parts
Bought at junkyards across America
He’s done almost all the work
Himself. Jesus has a real good set of tools.
Jesus had the white leather seats and
Funky purple shag interior
Put in at a really skanky
Part-time chop shop
In Matamores Mexico,
Just across the Rio Grande
From the home
Of the Confederate Air Force.
Jesus didn’t worry
About the vatos stuffing
His fine new seats
With horseshit as a prank.
His Spanish is pretty good,
And he’s unselfconscious about
His Aramaic accent.
Plus, those vatos at the chop-shop
Can sense He’s got connections,
They, can tell that he’s a Man
Who just doesn’t care a whole lot about pain.
They’d sooner dick Jim Morrison,
Who isn’t dead,
He just went home.
Jesus’ El Camino
Is beginning to shape up
Into one boss ride, at least it is
If you know your rolling iron. At
First glance it don’t look like much,
But that base staccato rumble comes
Not from a loose set of valves and
Holes rotted in the pipes, but is instead
A carefully tuned symphony
300 big Detroit horses
marching together
way down low.
You can tell for sure
By the clear, odorless
Exhaust.
When He scrapes together the cash
For those new glass-packs
He saw in the Car & Driver
You’ll hear a distant thunder
Tooling slowly up Elm Street
On a Saturday night and
You’ll know for sure
That Jesus has returned
To Dallas Texas.
But first, He’s gonna paint
The whole thing
Bed and all
With one contiguous paint job.
Jesus has been driving
That old El Camino
For the past ten years,
And He hasn’t exactly neglected
Its appearance: He’s replaced
Those dented fenders
With cherry fenders from
Two junked out El Caminos
That didn’t have that many other
Useable parts, and he’s put nice smooth
Bond-o on all the holes left when
He cut away the cancerous red rust
And on the jury rigged but modest
Hood scoop covering the custom 880 carb,
But He still needs to
Take the whole body apart and
Sandblast it down and
That means taking it off the road for a whole
Three-day weekend working twenty hours a day and
Jesus don’t do speed no more.
He really needs to get on with it,
‘cause He shelled out a pretty penny
for all that paint (Candy-Arterial Red in metallic flake)
long enough ago that it’s starting to mock him tucked away
in the corner of the woodshop
and one of his asshole disciples
hit upon the fact that since its
left front fender comes from a ’76 El Camino
And its right from a ’77 El Camino,
Jesus’ El Camino proclaims
the mystery of trinity
Father, Son, and Holy El Ca-fucking-mino.
He really should bite the bullet and do it today.
But if he puts off the hassle of
Taking all that downtime
For just another forty days and nights,
He can finally afford that Techniques stereo
To keep him company
Driving alone in the wilderness or with
St. Anthony riding shotgun,
Somewhere near the lip
Of the American Abyss.
I don't write love poems babe.
Don't write 'em,
Don't read 'em,
Can't stomach 'em.
All that pap and puke
About sunshine and flowers
About how I could sit and stare for hours
At your fair hair or eyes or shape or form
And how the irregularities of your skin are like a Rembrandt babe.
- Max Earl Blair
(added 08.03.08)
LOVE POEM
I hate love poems babe.
All of them rhyme.
They rhyme time with clime
And rime with sublime
And call it pretty.
Real poems don't rhyme babe.
And that's because anything real
Has got to contain and thus express
Some portion of the immense swirling chaos called the universe
that each of us is a part of.
Anything else is bullshit, babe.
And anyhow, who said
That love was pretty babe?
I remember the first time I fell in love
I thought I was coming down with something.
I couldn't eat
Couldn't sleep
And didn't have a normal bowel movement for six weeks.
I've got that sonnet writin'
Portuguese lookin'
Barret-Browning bitch's picture
Tacked right dead center
In the middle of my dartboard.
That's what I think of love poems, babe.
Nope. I don't write love poems, babe.
I write poems about things that matter.
About how the clear blue Texas sky
When seen against the complimentary
Orange-red dust
Of the cactus decked desert
As the sun just begins to burn away
The morning chill
Can cause you to find your place
In this great complex machine of machines that we call life.
Because that's the kind of poet I am, babe.
I got the wind in my hair
And the stars in my eyes
But I still got these boots
Firmly planted on the earth I came from
And I'm confident enough in my masculinity to write it all down.
Yes I am babe.
I'll love you babe,
I swear I will.
And if you'll take this baldhead poet's love
You'd better be prepared for my great love
To sweep away the mountains
And to dry the deep blue sea.
My love for you will know no bounds
Of time or shape or space or form
And when fair Venus' eye doth pierce the clouds,
She will bow and weep with jealousy.
But don't expect me to write about it.
- Max Earl Blair
(added 08.03.08) |
