Real Gone

Just had another poem published at don’t submit! here

Real Gone

evidently a cat is walking a cigar-
puffing man on a leash
as the streetlights
squirm like bellydancers
twirling tinseled haloes on the wet streets;

a night train passes a vintage
clothing shop and vanishes;
the silence quickens into significance;
shadows grope
a scarlet alleyway, clamber up
the stairs of a fire-escape, peep out
a window, take the form
of a simple a nothing
a chickenbone with dumpster
fire dreams; and there goes a page
of homeless periodical floating into the dawn;

there goes a skeleton sucking on
a bottle of rum; there goes the silhouette
of a cockroach growing
to hideous proportions
on the wall of a cathedral; a gargoyle utters
in brogue; an area man exits a french
restaurant convinced
he is real.

Shit Town

Old poem that I revised a bit and just had published by don’t submit. https://donotsubmit.net/shit-town-by-m-p-powers/

Shit Town

No one here listens to Beethoven.
No one reads the Greeks, or Shakespeare,
or Nietzsche. (Or if they do
they keep it a secret,
not wanting to be made fun of
for being an elite, or pretentious).
Shit town.

A town whose mayor moonlights as a life
coach despite his 2 bankruptcies
and 7-year sniffing
glue addiction.
Shit town.
Where half the cops are peeping
toms and cat burglars by night.
Where the barbers can’t cut hair or hold
a decent conversation.
Where the plumbers call themselves
crapologists.
Where every Circle K has a beercan
philosopher
standing outside it and the firemen
just want to hold a big hose.
Shit town.

And it’s true what they say.
Nobody here cares about anything but money;
poetry counts for nothing and no one
ever seems to mention
the night James Valvis, the town preacher,
mixed ketamine with rye whisky and Viagra
and mugged a Bolivian tomato picker
behind the trouser rack at Big & Tall.
“Yo, dog, that bling is fly,” he said, then admitted
feeding his ‘libtard’ stepfather to feral
hogs and collecting the insurance money
for the next two years.
Shit town.

And the woman here have all the charm
of a goat chewing bumblebees.
And the kids bathe in that irrigation
ditch behind Jersey Mike’s Subs.
And there’s a drive-thru lane at the morgue
because it used to be an Arby’s.
Shit town.
And the rent adjustment commissioner
just got run over
by his own lawnmower
and ended up in the bag.

“Hey, I’ll lather myself
in the bodily fluids
of Joe Rogan if I dern-tootin’ want to,”
said Mather
Snyder, 32, a disgraced softball
coach and highly qualified feces
picker-upper
from Big Beaver, Saskatchewan.

And it was the eleventh hour
of the Feast of the Apparition of Our Lady
of Guadalupe
and we were eating fish head stew
we’d heated up on the dashboard
of a Buick Roadmaster
when Don Parcheesi, 45, a Chinese
herbalist from Chokoloskee,
ran out into the parking lot with his hair
on fire and offered a pair of eel-skin
slippers to the Judges of Hades.
“You bastards!” he shouted. “Give me life!
Give me life!
Make
things beautiful!”

2 Micro Poems

Got two micro poems published the other day in Subliminal Surgery.

Rigged

Happiness is the big stuffed
animal
the ring toss game refuses
to bear.

Childhood                                     

 I think of you as I do
a bouquet of red balloons
floating over some long-forgotten
poet’s crumbling and moss-caked
headstone.

2 Poems (The Sisyphos of Bruno-Bürgel-Weg, Deconstruction)

Got a couple poems published today in the latest issue of Transients Magazine: https://transientsmagazine.weebly.com/issues.html. The first one is new, the second is an old one from my poetry collection Hallucinogenic Dragonfly Intermezzo, available here for only $8.95.

The Sisyphos of Bruno-Bürgel-Weg

every morning they would pass
under my window: a tall old man pushing
his quarter ton companion in a double-wide
wheelchair

the wheelbase of the chair
was too wide for it to fit on the sidewalk
they would travel on the street the cars swerving
around them honking people ogling no one
offering help it was understood
that this was the old man’s boulder back humped
eyes bulging old legs driving stopping
every fifty feet or so to catch his breath or mop
his troubled face

I didn’t know the relationship
of the two I only knew that they came from the care
home down the street and would return
at sunset passing under my window they were
the timepiece of the street the personality
and little ornament dangling from it

but then one day
they didn’t go by and that day turned into several
months and I wondered if they’d been moved
to another care home or if the fat one died
or if the old man had said to hell with his boulder

but no one I asked seemed to know the answer
and now the only memento left to remind me
of them is a green dumpster parked at the construction
site next to the care home

the dumpster is the property
of a company called SISYPHOS and in big
white letters it has that word painted
on the side of it.

Deconstruction

I’ve gotten wild with my pickaxe, trashing
everything I spent all my life building.
It’s been quite liberating,
and O so practical.
I can look in a mirror now
and see something.
I can look at a clock and see nothing
but a sad
compass of death.
The clock in me
is dead.
The hours I am living are no longer
living me.
The whole in the ecstasy
I am
is forgetfulness.
I am whole in the blood
of the grape,
and where my tragedies and weaknesses are fermented
a mysterious power
gathers.
I drain a cup
of oblivion,
slam my pickaxe into another wall.
It crumbles and out
falls
a ring.