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Mistletoe Moment
Good faith in bad beer coming my way
on holiday, celebrated on a couch
as intricate as a Jewish banker’s vest dreamt
in a German-designed lucid bad dream.
Our curled toes greeted space heater coils,
as she strategically placed a coaster on the
last scrap of wood from Heinrich Steinweg’s first piano,
At that moment I make it a mistletoe moment.
I married a doll; many, actually. Dozens displayed
spot-free in wicker hats, plastic plump cheeks,
like babies winking in hot wax. I found a coaster:
a binder, pictures of people dead in their beds.
Hair spread to the side like tea bag tag strings,
tucked into Sunday best. Bed sheets for all eternity.
- Tyler Malone
(featured in the poetry forum 12.20.11)
editor's note: Holiday hijinx and homage to German ingenuity; sleep until magic morning openings reveal... another doll. Jingle bells! - mh
Mindful of the Mind, the Meaning of Meows
Under a porch swing hung by rusted chains
a cat lay in decay, lapping itself.
On its head, a little fur, mostly the remains of a face.
From ear to eye, all can see what’s inside.
Mange exposed skull, veins, discolored muscle.
Flies land and try to suck at the musky surface
but the feline moves to lick where she carries
a tumor like a love song, never purring, never playful,
just lucky the eye stays in its socket.
Licking, she found decay not tasty, but a habit
like laying on concrete. Only her owner didn’t ignore her
as she inspected her pet’s rot.
“This cat is falling apart. It must be the heat.”
“Worthless pet. Do you know what we did when it was hot?”
No one does.
“Dead or dying, we picked more cotton.”
Armed with a fly swatter, she smacks the tumor.
The cat left behind blood spots and bad memories.
Minutes later, she asked, “Where is my beautiful cat?”
No one answered. They lick on good memories while they can
while looking deep into their iced tea, pretending
their days aren’t all decay, inside and out.
- Tyler Malone
(featured in the poetry forum 10.15.11)
editor's note: Wow! It's a game of "Tumor! Tumor! Who's got the tumor?" Only, I think the cat is not the one infected. - mh
“UFO”
Earth became ugly on the last day,
the first day of unemployment. Laid off,
but not laying off 40% clear stuff
or feel good fast food fish tacos with friends
who organize my next move like employment
is chess or wrestling a moon-sized maniac.
The check came in a black leather book saying
Thank You so waitresses don’t have to. Mine’s paid.
All I hear in generosity is how I hate myself
for petty theft, smiling at strangers,
strangers smiling back, I remembered it all,
the sober empathy.
I love myself for the liquor store as
a truck full of pity chauffeurs myself and my
spiced rum bagged and chilled at my crotch
at a stop light’s lambent lit above, below
I see something not belonging to man’s planet.
On the property of a rock crushing quarry,
built to cut through atmospheres,
a phosphorescent orange orb on concrete blocks,
like hillbillies had taken up residence after
gunning the ship down by buckshot, BBQing the bodies.
No laws or locked doors
keep me from space flight curiosity:
Destiny as inevitable as asteroid dents,
crop circle conspiracies, clouds, human nipples.
Among stacks of sliced, stacked stones,
I run to the top hatch—
Every boy uses imagination to fly,
in bad dreams they fall,
same as every deadbeat getting away
from friends now running in the quarry
looking for me among rubble, planetary plundering,
I jump into the metallic rabbit hole—
A circular bench wraps around the hull,
Men’s magazines, dust jackets but no book intestines,
Bob Dylan albums, battery powered CD player. I sit,
spine bent to see if I could sleep on an interstellar trip.
A wheel’s in the middle, to outturn comets?
Squinting goodbye to the sun, through the hatch,
there will be more stars in new worlds—
A head muzzles the afternoon’s lucent light.
“This isn’t your home,” says the shadow in the construction helmet.
Yes, that’s precisely my problem.
Commanding my spine straight,
but bending my neck to fit the ship’s curve.
“We keep this for a homeless guy. This is his home,”
Even the homeless have homes. “What is this?”
“It’s a man’s home you’re squatting in.
But more accurately, it’s an oil platform escape pod.”
Built to bob, not to escape atmospheres.
Never believe stranger’s cover ups: The next day
The pod was gone. Unemployment,
the government wanted to keep me.
- Tyler Malone
(added 10.15.11)
0s and Fs
“The tongue moves [in prayer] but does not speak.”
~ Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu (Mother Teresa)
Born to speak, I rehearsed words,
but mathematic calculations:
Tapping on fabricated calculators:
Unraveling universal mechanics,
got me poor marks, 0s and red Fs:
Miscalculations lamentations, and
parents pitied my brain, they prayed
for God to open my mind—for God
so loves the lazy children
not mindful of work ethic—
but no ethics were brought into this,
the brain was God’s business.
I was damned by the dictionary, the good book—
After the second report card, failure reaffirmed,
I was off to the third revival of the week.
Hands were laid upon my un-mathematical head.
Moving mouths, born with tongues, obtained language,
rambled God’s speech, exhalations in tongues:
Unintelligible words, incoherent invocations.
Tenebrous unspellable words, just 0s and red Fs.
- Tyler Malone
(featured in the poetry forum 07.30.11)
The Only Thing Funny About a Cock Fight Is the Name
The sanguinary sanctuary came with the
property, so a full-sized family fully filled
half of half of a mobile home:
A single-wide severed to a quarter-wide
among mesquite trees. Next door,
in a double-wide Buddhist temple,
prayers repeated, beckoned an Awakening
or any Nirvana by a dirt road.
Without a home, families are feral, much
like the dozens of roosters they owned,
caged by chicken wire fences, blinded by
masks, roosters tethered by shoestrings to stakes,
fed on scattered feed and dirt, a mask was slipped,
revealing a missing an eye: A war hero shared fence space
with a rooster missing a foot, a yellow stump—a popsicle stick.
Their stakes were pulled up like trailers in tornadoes.
Each contender attacked in pecks.
What beautiful humans they’d make.
The one with one leg grew
a new appendage:
a talon hung from its throat.
As Buddhists mediated hair growth
and peace among all things and fig trees,
the stabbed bird toppled, twitched,
bled to death.
Clutching a once clucking, reincarnated, possible ancestor,
the masked cockerels—living witnesses and a wife heard:
“Dear, it only has one leg, but we’re blessed
with a chicken dinner tonight!”
- Tyler Malone
(added 07.30.11)
Hot Crimes at the Scene of the Time
On hot days, dusty window tint snaked through lots
looking for a less sweaty walk to Adobe shops,
corner to corner, plus sizes to caged mice in pet shops.
No clouds canopied weathered bench screws and
rust-free germy handles hung on to black hole windows
as 10 languages hissed bargains from inconsiderate speakers,
as mothers and strollers slithered between shadow and sun
past open doors, cooling sunburned concrete, snapping pop music poison.
The dollar’s dogma disciplined disciples by discounts
while grackles publicly pleaded for pretzel samples;
cricket corpses collected in corners, and no matter
the season’s styles, scales were shed for new threads,
While, in ceilings, rats were safe from fangs and
the soundtrack of quarter-operated laughter.
- Tyler Malone
(featured in the poetry forum 05.21.11)
Off the Balcony, Bacon!
After working hours, is happy hour. Friends meet for cheap,
Carbohydrated drinks.
Instead she clocked out and came dressed in grey cotton, to sweat in
an apartment garage: Converted to a gym, padded with dumbbells.
I enjoy the view from my monthly lent balcony, and see
the trainer, my neighbor, command “Shoulders to knees!”
A barbarically behemoth body rolls, the piglet gives a grunt,
it runs up three stories (forty steps) and knocks at my door.
The trainer gets the straining belly rolling,
bulging, abs deep under her gargantuan bulb.
Ecstatically coaching a glacier into a sprint
or Jupiter to spin faster. Both could be easier.
Popping down three stories (forty steps), around
parked Mercedes’ and unlocked Mazdas, steam and smell from
my bag of popcorn pushes the sow back down
before she can sit-up—“Shoulders to knees!”—to number three.
- Tyler Malone
(featured in the poetry forum 03.29.11)
A Morning With Dusty
Dusty needed a job, he must have, because
no sane man brews coffee at four A.M.
for wheel twisting, peddle pushing, demented drivers.
Dusty kept a cigarette behind each ear,
reeked of a Sunday afternoon, roadside beer bottle,
wore goatee scruff and vomit teeth un-brushed in his head.
Dusty poured a flask into a twenty-ounce cup
and covered the secret with four A.M. coffee.
His background check did not dig too deep.
Dusty rolled off the rubber band
when the morning paper hit the door,
went straight to page three paradise.
Dusty pointed at his own mug shot. “That’s me,”
he said proud of slight celebrity status:
Arrested for inciting violence and assault with a deadly weapon:
a beer bottle.
Dusty found his wife in the men’s room
not alone.
Dusty douched his mouth with coffee, gurgled, swallowed and
unholstered his cigarettes to take a state-approved smoke break.
- Tyler Malone
(featured in the poetry forum 02.05.11)
American Muscle
With a leaned limp, weighed with a wash bucket,
all day, he’s spent like girls bronzing tan lines away:
Shirtless in the sun, bartering parking lot to parking lot
in strained elastic waistband sweatpants
cowering under his bold belly;
offerings spotless washed windshields for only
payments of whatever change wallowed in water,
sour chew spit, sticky soda sugars in cup holders.
Dusk died in red and purple dye in the sky
and he caught every last violent ray
as he cleaned bug guts, dirt chips,
remains of the last decent rain
as sweat etched his epidermis;
by the bucket, he smiled and stood
as soap bubbles dissolved in polluted water,
for vehicle owners to slip out a sandwich shop
like squeezable mustard, with full stomachs
and generous giving’s of loose change.
His sponge had licked every international car
with American muscle, including mine;
he caught me full of a club sandwich, like a vampire
fresh stuffed from an all-nighter blood buffet.
My key’s teeth chewed, the door unlatched,
and the American working man
stood with an open hand,
starved for the taste for change,
nickels and dimes, but
all he got was pennies.
More, is what he asked for. More!
So short of small metallic circle currency,
I gave a grocery bag of bread and peanut butter;
in his hands was a moveable feast, my provisions—
he dropped it to the parking lot,
my meal for days. He demanded meat.
Meat! A meal from once-living creatures,
slimmed and sliced thin.
A family ambled out the sandwich shop
as slow as their arteries flowed.
He could hear their change cling
in their deep pockets
he could smell their wet change
in their car’s sloppy cup holders.
- Tyler Malone
(added 02.05.11)
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