Among the Attributes of a Basically Cruel Man

Today began a dreamsicle  made of dirt and up to us to pilot this sky's specific  dye lot. And why not?

Our lives are six or seven  people a lot, a couple dozen  less so, and an even call it  hundred lesser still. Today

it's the cinnamon blush  of rust on a dumpster. It's the city's talc of salt  and still ice bites onto the lot

in a couple spots. Took the skull  for a crawl is all and tried not to  fall through a city ultimately solvable, mere matter

of form. The locksmith's truck  fits surely into traffic. I've  climbed through four windows  twelve times, emerged smudged

or scraped, but home, where the thing about charm's it  doesn't give a fuck what  comes after adoration, only

more and more.

by James D'Agostino

Resumé

Razors pain you;  rivers are damp;  acids stain you;  and drugs cause cramp.  Guns aren't lawful;  nooses give;  gas smells awful;  you might as well live.

by Dorothy Parker 

One Interpretation of Your Silence

Probably I hurt your aesthetic feelings. How I said a thing, how I held a lamp to the night. These should walk without us-- words, the dark--is perhaps your view of existence. I can't know, you provide no puppet theater, no tumbling routine for me to engage in spirited discourse. That a face comes with every body, and a body with every name, makes it seem like we're the same species, when a cursory kissing shows how multiform any one puckerer is. I'm sorry I'm not the Wednesday or club sandwich you expected, imagine my surprise that you're not the world peace I really do want, it's not just a thing I say to the judges inspecting my cleavage. If you'll try again I'll try again, however trying we are. "To the puppies" is a phrase I carry around in search of the context in which shouting it will change everything.  If you have no such rip-chord, we really shouldn't be seen together in public, for you are the matter for which I am the anti-matter, and as "Lost in Space" showed us if it showed us nothing else, it's not good for life when they meet, and I want to do what is good for life, because I want life to return the favor.

by Bob Hicok

Wistful Sounds Like a Brand of Air Freshener

I will go to Belfast, Maine, and read my poetry to crabs. I'll stand on a platform of some kind in the company of wind and look at pennants waving and think of the claws of crabs waving in the wind of the Atlantic and be sad. It's not that I don't have enough sadness, but I'm always looking for better, more aquatic or tastier sadness, for the kind of light that comes when the sky tilts its head at dusk and wonders, in colors we understand as language, why this all has to end. I could doff a Bogart hat and wag a tough cigarette between my lips, smoke muscling up from my mouth as I say, it just does, sweetheart, it just does, but the psychology of the fedora escapes me. There's bread and calisthenics and lice and radar and jars of blue stuff in stores, and maybe what I'm doing when I cry to certain songs at seventy miles an hour, is proving I've noticed that out of the nothing that could be here, everything is. So I will go to Belfast, Maine, and wonder what it's like to stand beside Main Street in the winter, I'll put my head against the brick buildings I'm betting live there year-round and describe the tropics to them by having warm thoughts, and if you'd like to meet me there, I'll be the man in the t-shirt that has an extra sleeve in case the third arm I need shows up, because so far, I've dropped almost everything I'm desperate to hold.

by Bob Hicok

Paradise-Un

In the beginning God, unaccompanied, And unmanned, made light. Adam as yet unimagined.

Then the world unwound From heaven. The day unbuttoned From the night. The sea unearthed

And the earth unfastened The grass and the trees unhusked Their seeds. Adam unhastened.

God created he him, Adam unfallen, Unpinned from the ground. Unhitched Adam. Adam unbound.

And in order that Eve could uncage, Adam unribbed, and both undressed And were unashamed.

But the serpent (more subtle), unheard From until now, unlocked and unappled Eve, and Adam unabled.

Then the unthorned got thorns And the unthistled thistles, the earth Untoiled until then.

Adam unparadized — a song not Unsung, of life's uneasying, And Adam undone.

by Catherine Wing

Evolution Song

The poison frog becomes the poison arrow From a tadpole comes a toad To the lungfish comes the land we're on From the city comes the road

A milk thief once made butterfly A moth once lived in silk The mayfly lives and dies in May A bird was once an alligator's ilk

Those with spines will lose them And those without will gain A shell becomes your cover From water comes the rain

A hornworm ends a hawkmoth In the muscle is a mouse The egg tooth cuts the egg you're in Your temple turns to house

by Catherine Wing

Spring

To what purpose, April, do you return again? Beauty is not enough. You can no longer quiet me with the redness Of little leaves opening stickily. I know what I know. The sun is hot on my neck as I observe The spikes of the crocus. The smell of the earth is good. It is apparent that there is no death. But what does that signify? Not only under ground are the brains of men Eaten by maggots. Life in itself Is nothing, An empty cup, a flight of uncarpeted stairs. It is not enough that yearly, down this hill, April Comes like an idiot, babbling and strewing flowers.

by Edna St. Vincent Millay

From Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut

Sonnet #23

They may suppose, because I would not cloy your ear - If ever these songs by other ears are heard - With ‘love’ and ‘love’, I loved you not, but blurred Lust with strange images, warm, not quite sincere, To switch a bedroom black. O mutineer With me against these empty captains! Gird Your scorn against above all this word Pompous and vague on the stump of his career.

Also I fox ‘heart’, striking a modern breast Hollow as a drum, and ‘beauty’ I taboo; I want a verse fresh as a bubble breaks, As little false... Blood of my sweet unrest Runs all the same - I am in love with you - Trapped in my rib-cage something throes and aches!

by John Berryman

The Honest House

In an effort not to crawl back to you, I crossed the 2 train off my subway map in blue ink, called it a river, sold my canoe.

Swept the soot from the chimney into a vase, scattered it all over Manhattan. Husband, I pretended it was your ash.

Spoke your name in past tense and still, when we found ourselves in the same bar, phoned a mystic. Told her I was seeing ghosts.

When you confessed your mistress, her red hair, her scars, how you learned them from up-close, from inside out, you were no longer the man I married but a dead deer in the center of our swimming pool.

Our dog has always considered you a burglar. Knew to spit, bark, bite before I did. Once while you were sleeping, I stitched her electric fence through your skin. I wear her shock collar on nights I go out drinking, on days I can’t find a reason to stay away even though you have left so many behind.

I’ve watched you with other women. The way you hand fruit to supermarket clerks, how your eyebrows lift at anyone with fake nails. Your favorite party story is how you once, publicly, pleasured a girl with your band mate’s drumstick. It’s no wonder we don’t love the same music.

On our first date, I bought a dress off a woman in Brooklyn so I could stay with you one more day. Last week I threw your clothes from our roof knowing they would have fallen faster had there been a body in them.

When I found a picture of your ex-lovers tits, used as a bookmark, I began opening every novel upside down like a teenager shaking birthday cards waiting for cash to fall out. This explains my love for fiction. We were never married. The dog is not ours.

While washing the dishes I watch from the window as the children we never had drown in the piss-filled pool. I’ve never tried to save them. I invented that pool, this sink.

Did you know that the metronome inside us quickens when telling a lie? I want to build an honest house, where the motion detector is so sharp it knows when my thoughts leave the room. Where the clap-on lamp works as a polygraph. When you swear you still love me, the lights flicker.

by Megan Falley

From The Cosmic Joke by Charles Bukowski

Where We Slept Together

I open the doors of my house at night I latch the screens Allegory of love Like a dog shaking all over Like a bite that itches six inches deep My old radio is like a toothache Someone had in summers past Another place set at the table There are no longer any shotguns or guitars In my house There is a lotion for the hands Each blister another Blood-shot moon A yawn a blessing in disguise A branch where a bush grows Its thorns Allegory of love There are bookshelves I threw together I took the lumber From a horse thief's barn Go back And there are books the dead light their stoves with Books howling like pines on a ridge Cats in heat Deserted and cold Like a handgun or a spoor A gar looking for a wife in a swamp A room where a raped adolescent Is interrogated About her past sexual life Go back Wearing a hat of smudge candles Ducking back Up the fingers of the lake Like a ring or a cobweb You can pass my window you can pass My door You can step on the blade of my hoe All these maps These photographs I have wasted nails on The cut lines it took so long to clear Are growing back Scars I have looked for furrows in the dust On the banister And long hair in the bed Scabs like butterflies Standing up for the flag Rocks in the garden of love The clouds are like fat grandmothers Before they were mothers Getting ready for a dance All these spools of barbed-wire I meant to put up When the orchard was mine I'm sore from mending Small holes with tissue Allegory of love The rented tomb Like a sour mash Brewing in the ditch They're snoring underwater They're droning like ships departed From the black holes of space In the morning I'm going To leave A bottle on the stump Like thunderclouds And packages of blood The seeds in the hardware store Like a stew for flies It boils down To a slop jar at the foot of this bed

by Frank Stanford

America by Allen Ginsberg

Prayer for the Man Who Mugged My Father, 72

May there be an afterlife.

May you meet him there, the same age as you. May the meeting take place in a small, locked room.

May the bushes where you hid be there again, leaves tipped with razor-       blades and acid. May the rifle butt you bashed him with be in his hands. May the glass in his car window, which you smashed as he sat stopped       at a red light, spike the rifle butt, and the concrete on which you’ll             fall.

May the needles the doctors used to close his eye, stab your pupils       every time you hit the wall and then the floor, which will be often. May my father let you cower for a while, whimpering, "Please don't            shoot me. Please." May he laugh, unload your gun, toss it away; Then may he take you with bare hands.

May those hands, which taught his son to throw a curve and drive a nail       and hold a frog, feel like cannonballs against your jaw. May his arms, which powered handstands and made their muscles jump       to please me, wrap your head and grind your face like stone. May his chest, thick and hairy as a bear's, feel like a bear's snapping       your bones. May his feet, which showed me the flutter kick and carried me miles       through the woods, feel like axes crushing your one claim to man-       hood as he chops you down.

And when you are down, and he's done with you, which will be soon,       since, even one-eyed, with brain damage, he's a merciful man, May the door to the room open and let him stride away to the Valhalla       he deserves. May you—bleeding, broken—drag yourself upright.

May you think the worst is over; You've survived, and may still win.

Then may the door open once more, and let me in.

by Charles Harper Webb

You Don't Know What Love Is

You don't know what love is but you know how to raise it in me like a dead girl winched up from a river. How to wash off the sludge, the stench of our past. How to start clean. This love even sits up and blinks; amazed, she takes a few shaky steps. Any day now she'll try to eat solid food. She'll want to get into a fast car, one low to the ground, and drive to some cinderblock shithole in the desert where she can drink and get sick and then dance in nothing but her underwear. You know where she's headed, you know she'll wake up with an ache she can't locate and no money and a terrible thirst. So to hell with your warm hands sliding inside my shirt and your tongue down my throat like an oxygen tube. Cover me in black plastic. Let the mourners through.

by Kim Addonizio