It’s All Academic

This poem was just published at Horror Sleaze Trash. It’s also in my under-read, underappreciated erstwhile collection Hallucinogenic Dragonfly Intermezzo, available here.

It’s All Academic

Become a teacher.
Get a mortgage on a house in the suburbs.
Buy a car with good gas mileage.
Get involved in the local poetry readings.
Start a zine and publish only those who publish you.
Use superlatives
like ‘excellent’ or ‘brilliant’ when describing the lousy work of your friends.
(Flattery is your friend too).
Read William Carlos Williams.
Become obsessed with his Red Wheelbarrow theory.
Cultivate a garden in your backyard.
Plant it with lima beans, bell peppers, radishes.
Watch everything die.
Give up on it.
Read more William Carlos Williams.
Be sober.
Get tenure.
Never miss a meal.
Ignore your betters.
Go bald.
Get back to nature.
Begin by mowing your own lawn.
Write some poesy about it (in the Charles Simic style – trade
Williams
in for him).
Become obsessed with chinch bugs and molecrickets
and the growth of grass and various types of weed killers.
Crash into a stump with your lawnmower.
Do a flip over the handlebars.
Get whiplash.
Wear a neckbrace for some months.
A fat and cumbersome one.
One that presses down into your collarbones and pushes up
into your jowls so your jowls
drape themselves over the edges of it
giving you the appearance of a Basset Hound with its flabby
mug sitting on a linoleum floor.
Believe that your students are noting your wit
when they’re really drawing cartoons of you.
Sell your lawn equipment.
Hire cheap Guatemalan labor and pay off your house
and pay off your car
and be even more sober
and buy a Hog
and leathers and a plasma TV.
And come home early from a faculty meeting one day
and witness
the meter reader
or the software salesman
or the bug exterminator
working away
on your wife.
You start shouting
and they start shouting and you ball
up your fists and the veins stand up in your forehead
and your whole bald head turns red and then
a deep shade of monkey-vomit purple comes down over your face
and he climbs off her
apologizes snatches up his clothes and balls
them up and placing them carefully over his nether regions
slinks half-nude along the wall and out the front door
and you go into your study
and you bawl God out
and reach for a glass of water.
Then reach for Simic.
When he fails
reach for Galway
Kinnell and Kinnell failing
lick your wounds
and check your pride
and forgive your wife
Because you can’t really blame her.
You turned her into your mother the day you got married
and besides, a poet needs a little pain in his life.
It gives him something to write about.
But don’t write about that.
Keep writing your surrealism, or whatever you call it.
Follow the herd.

hemingway and I

hemingway and I

ernest hemingway and I share
the same eleventh great-
grandfather which I know
isn’t much it’s barely anything
at all but still it’s a bit
strange that when I go up
that branch of my tree I see
a murderer a pestilence
of suicides of drunkards a boxer
no writers unfortunately
but my grandfather
who was humorless as a bedbug
loved to hunt and fish
items found in his trailer
post-mortem: a shotgun
a six pack of hamm’s a pair of tap-
dancing shoes $17 a cane
with a knife that pops out the bottom
and a sex tape for beginners.

Neighbors

It’s my neighbor.
It’s the one my landlady warned me about.
It’s the unemployed anthropologist.
It’s the one with the 5-tier shoe-tree
outside her door
because shoes are forbidden
from entering
her home.
I see her sometimes mounting the stairs,
or in the check-out line in the grocery store,
or down by the trash cans,
and she returns my hellos
never.

I can hear her through the bathroom wall.
She’s masturbating again.
She does it under the faucet.
She does it in the evenings around 8.
I exit the bathroom,
go into the other room,
and start going
over the piles of German
bureaucratic paperwork I’ve been bombarded
with lately:

Sehr geehrter Herr Powers…

I wade through a couple pages with the help
of Bing Translator,
then take the plug out of my laptop,
take it and my piles out onto my balcony,
and sit down
with a bottle
of French red.

It’s warm out here for a September night.

I can hear dishes clanging in the Italian restaurant.
I can hear the muttering of Germans on the sidewalks.
I can’t hear my neighbor masturbating
from here,
but after couple minutes, she appears,
a lonely
silhouette
on her balcony.

I’m done saying hello
to her,
I tell myself.

I slouch down a little more in my chair,
take a big swig of wine
and attempt to conquer
words like Unterhaltsberechtigten
and Zahlingsmodalitäten, and Vermögensverhältnisse,
but it’s no good.
I can’t go on.

The night’s too beautiful to waste on bureaucratic German.
Should I answer some of my unanswered emails?
Should I start in on a poem?
Should I have a couple drinks at one of the bars down below?
I look up.
My neighbor is looking.
She looks away.
She goes inside without acknowledging.

She’s right.
Small, superficial
courtesies
aren’t worth the trouble,
and we know well enough where we stand
with each other.

We don’t.

This is from my Hallucinogenic Dragonfly Intermezzo collection, which is available through me or here on Amazon for only $8.95.

Easter Services

Easter Services

There is a church
on the other side
of that garage door.

Inside the church
(which used to be a Jiffy Lube)
there is music,
there are stomping feet
there is a passion-inflamed
madman
shouting
into a megaphone.

Jesus is being summoned
on the other side
of that garage door.

But on this side,
where gas-powered tools
leak and dream
to be rented, a white cat wanders
into the room
with a white-haired
hoarder.

“They’re either right
or ridiculous,” he says, referring to the
churchgoers.
“Maybe neither. But you can’t say
they’re wrong.”

(repeat)

And disappears into a cloud
of smoke,
leaving me alone
with the cat and the sound of glory
beating
down a garage door.

This poem was just published by Bombfiire Lit. https://bombfirelit.com/2024/03/24/easter-services-by-m-p-powers/

Lobster Bob

Happy to announce my full-length poetry collection, Strange Instruments, will be published by Outcast Press in 2025. This collection is 69 pages, divided into 7 themed sections: Bone Orchard Ballads, Love & Transience, Night, Death & Dream, Faust’s Metropolis, Alligator State, and Profiles of the Possessed and Dispossessed.

In the meantime, here’s a poem that’s not in the collection.

Lobster Bob

I was sitting at the bar listening to mark
telling
me about his roommate, lobster bob.
“he brings home a different
whore
three or four times a week.
“bartrolls. nothing but bartrolls.”

“still,” I said, “three or four times
a week? it’s not easy to pick up
anything three or four times
a week.”

“yeah it is,” said mark. “you find the grossest
chick in the place…
at 2.a.m.
I mean the grossest…
that’s what he
looks for, and gets…”

as he was saying this, lobster bob came sidling out
of the bathroom.
he was about 45, with a loose-hanging
aloha shirt and a limp mop
of lord Fauntleroy hair framing his bloated
pink face. He looked a bit like a lobster,
but that’s not
how he got the name.

we watched as he nuzzled up to some lady
at least ten years
his senior,
her broad beam spilling over
the barstool.

“and look at him now,” mark went on.
“he’s at it again…
the disgusting
fuck… and i’m gonna have to listen
to it
through the wall.”

we both
shook our heads. I was
laughing… lobster bob
was more
of a man
than either of us
could
ever be.

Hitman’s Blues

This poem was just published in the latest issue (83) of miniMag. You can read it here.

Hitman’s Blues

The past
that lives in old faded photographs
old stomping grounds
and places of horror I frequented but never
felt like I belonged

The past
that brims with dead friends disembodied voices
twisted roads abandoned dreams
enters my room each night like a hitman,
his face bony, crescent-shaped,
his wings spread,
black, sharp-tipped wings drawing shade over me.
He has come for a love letter
I’ve left unwritten in my heart. He has come for a ring,
for paintings,
a knife to sever my fingers with.

The past that enters my soul each night
thinking it can take from me
the way it used to
when I was younger, when I cared too much
when I loved too little, or too recklessly,
exits me every morning
with those stupid wings folded, head down,
pushing a shopping cart of empty beer bottles
back into the past.

A Reacquaintance

New poem from the lastest issue (79) of miniMAG. You can read it here: https://minimag.space/

A Reacquaintance

That thing you see in the mirror
every day that flesh-and-bone
miracle
is not really you;
it’s just something for you
to keep a little while and discard
like an empty tomato can.

It’s not you.
Not your hair, your nose, not your throat,
your genitals, feet.
It’s a loan, a metaphor, a means for growth.

Nothing to grow too attached to.
Nothing to do
with the real you
the lying alone you
the dormant you
lying in bed at 2:30 a.m., listening to the night
creatures and gongs of thunder

Your tongue tastes of something raw.
Your breath catches.
You have forgotten about your job,
your family, your responsibilities & goals.

It’s just you here. A theater with echoes
and no audience. A god
born into darkness.

An old friend
who knows.

The Day After

Just had this poem published in Stone Circle Review. Link here: https://stonecirclereview.com/the-day-after/

The Day After

I.

In the silence between fires, a train passes. The garden opens its eyes. A woman’s voice floats on waves of air. It’s still morning out here. Still early enough for the trees to climb the sky, for the trains to run backwards, for Spring to exchange its tenor for three gold rings of the crumbling moon.

II.

The moon out here is crumbling, but last night it was an omen, silver-headed cow with God-spun eyes. Last night the moon that’s crumbling in a pillar of crimson cloud remembers. How could it forget? Even the wind remembers when the forest decomposed and the Cadillac that was my mind wrapped itself around a tree.

III.

What was I thinking? I must’ve been mad! Who mistakes an image for a thing and a graven thing for an omen makes for a standing thundercloud. An omen isn’t a thing, I tell you. A thing is right here between silent fires. Where the moon is parable and the trees all stand up naked, the flowers grow radiant with secrets.

The Initiate (an excerpt)

Amazon sales for my novel seem to have dried up, but here in Berlin, I’ve sold all 20 of my first batch. I say sold. I didn’t sell them all. At a Thanksgiving party last night, someone I don’t know very well asked about my book, so I got a copy out of my backpack.
“It’s €XX,” I said.
“It’s what I say it is,” she said, grabbing it out of my hands. “I’ll pay you what I think it’s worth when I finish it. Until then…” And stormed off drunk.

Most of my books have gone to friends and people at the bar I go to, but I’ve also got the support of two English bookstores in Prenzlauerberg, St. George’s, and Love Story of Berlin.

I just ordered another 20 copies, so if you want to you can either contact me or buy it here on Amazon: https://a.co/d/7WSpQQZ

Here is a little excerpt:

It’s been said of Berlin that it’s a city that’s always becoming, but never finally is. It’s a city eternally under construction; it’s a caterpillar turning into a butterfly turning into a thief with one eye and a bootful of gold coins; it’s an androgynous god trying on an array of colorful wigs, changing earrings, slipping into a pair of fuck-me pumps, then taking it all off and trying on something completely different. Berlin is a city that never stops metamorphosing; even if you leave it for a week, or a weekend, you come back and notice some change.

The Pickled Tortoise was the same. It was a microcosm of the city. There were always new crowds appearing, old crowds departing, old regulars vanishing without a trace, and a million other nuanced alterations.

On the following Tuesday night, I’d arrived there early, but already there was a crush of people around the tables, and the seats at the bar were all spoken for. The place was jammed like I’d never seen it before, and hardly recognized anyone. I worked my way to the bar with the five copies of Nightseamusic that I’d brought along. I was hoping to sell all five for €10 a piece, but it might’ve been wishful thinking. The last time I came with five copies, I only sold two, one to Latex Tim, who somehow lost his copy, the other to Batu, the Mongolian-Canadian, whose English wasn’t the greatest, and probably only bought it out of sympathy. Whatever. If I made enough tonight to pay for my drinks and a kebab on the way home, I’d be happy.

I ordered a beer with the new bartender, paid, then sat on the sofas in the back with Ken Downes and Malcom Rumgay.

“So, what happened?” Ken wanted to know.

I explained…

American Dissident

It’s been at least 10 years since I’ve submitted anything to G. Tod Slone’s American Dissident, but I was reminded of him when I came across a poem I’d written about him years ago. The poem needed major reworking, and I did that, and I’m happy with it, but where do you send a poem about G. Tod Slone to? Certainly not G. Tod Slone. I sent him some others and he accepted 3, out now in the latest print issue.

You can learn more about G. Tod and his magazine here: https://theamericandissident.org/index.html.

Here is 1 of the 3 poems that he published:

Aspirations

One day, I would like to do
what the highbrow poets do
and write about
things like goldenrod, and the whelk,
and morning glories, and the plate of escargots
de Bourgogne consumed
with a rare, vintage wine (whose name must also be
italicized)
while suppering with a gaggle of upper
crust intellectuals
at some Michelin-rated restaurant
in Soho.

One day, I would like to let everyone know
how comfortable I am
at my little writing desk or milling
about my garden, exotic species
of butterfly whirring
about my head, my newly blossoming mustard
greens and
kale and Swiss Chard smiling upon me,
seed in the birdfeeder.
my belly full, my socks and underwear
freshly ironed,
mortgage paid off,
tenure in order.

One day, I would like to live a life
where I wouldn’t have to deal with any of you
unwashed
uneducated working-class pricks
and everything
around me – including the people –
would be worthy
of italics.