worthwhile creatures
my poems don’t matter
the breasts of devils give ill milk
and each tragedy of a big cunt or bad circulation can’t
nullify:
the dirty snow or
augered shitholes
centralized heat or
the gigas bible of women laying salt on porches
or shaking bags of kibble calmly
the wind is and g o e s
and the pages of cunts kill
many more men than bombs
individually
mighty
waiting
chewing
wailing
my poems don’t matter
however many breasts ezra may have touched
another beer to set my sails
towards pumping another tragic grave
another hole to fill
with birth and tar and halh-hearted hate
smoking
blood wings, a boneyard filled
with grave womanhood
another body sighs, rolls away
from lovemate, from shame, from self, from madness
another day I shower
alone
feeling and squealing and emptied
content
the big beguiling tragedy framed
on the living pasture of my plaster walls
devoid of studs and crooning
devoid servility at christmas
“baaaahh baaaaahh” the goat of my senility groans
towards death: another cunt
to conquer
better angels of our nature
there’s more life in the trash piles than in POETRY MAGAZINE January 2thou twenti1. the women with stomachs like scarf valances
know more about pain and freedom than any asshole on capitol hill.
Heresy, the hundred thousand lights on MY river tonite. kill the phones
and spare the mice. Feed me any satin skinned lie. bed me, beat me, bleed me, leave me. Force the hotwater life through my sensitive gums. place the papers in the fire with POETRY MAGAZINE. make Kamala
read Knut’s Hunger and make Trump sack down the itchweed railroad. hang the sky at twilight and let the sickly people sleep. Lennon used to get up early to watch all the little people walk to work while Chapman loaded up on misguided literature. anything can kill you and all the dumbsaints know: they don’t let you sleep in bus stations and they rob the poorest out of dimes. I was once held at gunpoint for $40 and rolled for less than that. stop watching CNN. stop paying for the papers and tell POETRY MAGAZINE that six pages of abstract marker drawings doesn’t make the human animal froth. eat the biggest tomahawk steak with a quart of beauty geuze. and if you still need poetry…..talk to your trash man. he knows which way the wind blows.
carnage come home to roost
delusion, collusion, and all the midnights
DRUNK
mad derision-
the axe is readied for fall
the plane of days keeps going
coping on the sheets
of lover’s past
spread in the shaven pages of mind memory
my dog, my friends, and my television
forsaken
flowers in the fan dust, holes in the new plaster
pain beneath a granted granite
wrinkles, non-events, lyme, lockjaw, seclusion
doom, and all the midnights
DRUNK
forgotten, resung, re-woven
with precognition and pasteurized politics
hell come home
carnage, cotton candy, the republicans
hanging their own and all my days spent
waiting out the snow
to fuck the purple bull of morning
wake up
in sheets of asiago steak and hundred thread
give the best meat to your dog.
wake up
the phone is ringing
with questions and creditors on fog’s early breath.
wake up
the volcanoes are going, red orange worms
of madearth: magma. lava lakes bubbling
with reactionaries and hate speech.
wake up
the rioters are chanting
so that time should forget your name.
wake up
the prize bull was bred for bleeding
but they’re tearing down the statues
of Manolete.
wake up
the whole world is a workforce
sadkilling for a piece of green ass.
wake up
the world is less than dreaming.
a sum of parts
squandered
the wizard, the rapist and the girl in the grey sweaterdress
dancin’ at the end of a rope, a man invokes the muse
young things bare, with burdens and blood-dark lipstick
forgiven us all these things, we danse or bathe
we watch fish swim in a divine idiocy or flowers
goose step with the valkaryies in a serene breeze
manslaughter and missionary positions, somehow still
we find the will, to shave, to paint, to hit the walls or wed
the women, a million little marionettes hung by neurosis
pray to the muse, the solace, the solstice, the harvests
pray for anything but the past, with wizard gone upward
in hot air balloons, unmasked and escaping any prosecutions
boogie men without beds, the last thoughts atop the gallows
where the rapist confronts his choices and the old women
take snuff, invoke the muses of your future since that little
longlost thing in the sweaterdress of memory breastfeeds
another creature’s child, invoke the morning, invoke the sun
invoke the squirming seedling reaching for the angels perched
atop them crying out for growth, invoke the hangmen or the marionettes
sit down to cereal and whole wheat toast, sit down to a
routine, pray the muse and sit down without memory, pray
the muse and raise the cows, pray the muse and submit
to a simplicity
that exists
Nathan Tluchowski is a 30 year old poet who lives, writes, and drinks in Mingo Junction, Ohio. He is the author of the poetry collection : “Wild Ale Pomes” and his work has appeared in publications including: Adelaide Literary Magazine, Failed Haiku, Vagabonds by Weasel Press, JerryJazz Musician and the Whitewall Review.