Sunday, March 12, 2023

ronnie burk poem








(collage by r.b.)


Entombed

Unfurling a banner for
“A Butcher’s Holiday”
a tin of laminated sardines
arrives
Begging for more potash
Bela Lugosi’s armpit scratches dead air
Powahatan smoking old fires in the streets
aquatic steroids
All these corrosions beneath the shell of
my reckless heart
my heart of sliced throats
my heart of Aztec tendons
my syphilitic heart of lily-headed serpents
ready to attack the creators of
The Poison Milk Factory
demon in a dressing gown
the sugar seals
a satin slipper
sputtering the fragrance
Piss Angel
It is at this point we step into the cyclone
to embrace here and there
Moments of the sixth dawn
Crocodile banks of the Nile float on Tenochtitlán Highway
as polluted cities sink beneath the horizon of crazed Empire
Ancient castles wash up on the foreheads of black-rock mountains
Pulling the tip of your beard with the hand of a leprechaun
Your deerhunter’s cap brings a scene from a movie
& I am reminded it is The Saturn Return of The Chicano Movement
Having cracked the egg of hard-boiled reason
fever
light
People gather in the courtyard to watch the cobra
marry the hawk on my head
Fat baby Caduceus, I’m through!

Monday, October 31, 2022

Tuesday, October 18, 2022

ken wainio - getting rid of the ego

It’s like getting married in the rain. A coach will pull up
at the edge of the dam when the flood starts and the bride
throws her flowers at the drowned. If you don’t believe this,
go to a monastery for ten years and study the light through a
keyhole. Without moving your eye from the door cut out a
piece of sky and wait for somebody to come with a key.

The flood is well up by this time. The dead are getting
married in rowboats and copulating on pieces of wreckage. If
you still don’t believe it, take out your keyhole and study the
drowned. They are discussing the possibilities of islands and
shaping tombstones into anchors. Their children hold their
breath underwater and pray to the God of Rain. He is
holding himself in a cloud making everybody worship the
flood. He is quite fond of suffering and has never understood
sociology. But the dead come with their pogo sticks and stare
up at the seat of his pants.

If you still don’t get this, go sit down in the nearest bar
and study the runway of faces. If anyone comes up to you and
demands your marriage certificate, take out your keyhole and
blast them with a peak of stars. If they are still sitting there
waiting for you to kill your ego, tell them the world is flat and
has an edge like the table. Drop something transparent over
the side and tell them it was the argument of Columbus on
his way to the new world.