Issue 2:2 | Poetry | Ken Wainio
4 Poems |
 |
Invocation For Lorca
Come again where your dream
was spent
in a cemetery of live
guitars. Your
ears pierced with bullet
holes
hear us play in the paper
air
Come again with your
old-fashioned blood lamp
to light our rare way. Come
with grave clothes
worn to an indigo sheen, our
hound dog reflections
in dug-up light bulbs
Come again along the
obsolete storm drain
your plugged-in husk aglow.
Your ears
purring with thunder, your
carcass
tattooed with rainbows
Come again below the wine of
rides
and hanging gardens. Below
the sorrows
of creek beds the echo of
your voice
shows us where to go
Necropolis III
I try and go in
the other room but there’s always a heap of extinct species
screaming insane lies. I
take off my big shorts, my pet brain, even my severed penis,
which I keep in a can by the
bed, and try to relax, but no - dead dudes rush into the room
spraying canisters of youth,
all those untouchable moments at peace with your loved
ones, now a vapor of memory
hanging over a rotten ocean. Here bacteria do well in
cooling lava. They lay their
young dead, deepfreeze them while still infectious, and sell
them on watery planets with
destroyable air. Just back up clouds, erase dead animals,
then fast-forward from the
table of elements to the ill-lit somewhat artificial kitchen,
fabrication of all hosts,
and begin to incubate. There’s always a door to another kingdom,
submarine or long dormant. I
try to stay open.
Crust
They throw me a crust
Ok I eat it
They throw me another crust
I eat the dirt right out
from under them
I uncover a bag in a mass
grave
It has eyes painted on it to
throw off thieves
Grave thieves are rampant in
this country
I open the bag, but it’s
only a sacrificial child
Who knows what the gods
expect from
such a rotten kid. Ancestor
worship
Dead tribes heading into
heads
so dead they have been here
before
mythology. Witch doctors
waiting
for the pizza to arrive
The Cyclone
has just made love to the
Midwest
Big dripping paw holes
of carnage in supermarkets,
trailer
courts. Amusement parks,
cemeteries,
even the most remote Quick
Stops
have been laid open to its
obscene advances
It has touched down like a
transcendental
quarterback, reeking havoc
with UFOs
and the Bermuda Triangle. It
has opened
a little carnival on the
dark side of
scary rides everywhere in
the known
universe, being the produce
of two convergent
winds. Like its half-life,
the female
maelstrom, it loves to
circle. Look Ma,
No hands
