Of course all of this was before we got a functioning washer and dryer. Also, dog hair lint does not make for good paper. Recently though we had to start going back to the laundry mat for a while and during my boredom I took a bunch of pictures. I hope you enjoy.

There is a chorus of voices, and I am hunting ten at a time. This is the a.m. dial: amplitude modulation.

Voices from Tennessee, Virginia, New York, leaving their sphere of influence, I feel like a tourist: traffic on the George Washington Bridge, tires for sale in Nashville, the West Virginia Mountaineers down seven.

I am closer to home, a spy intercepting enemy transmissions, static under the bridge.

In the gaps between states, not the pure static of nothing but a rather full rooms where each conversation in trying to rise above the din. There are righteous voices in mono, a pulpit with a broken speaker, the Americana of original sound.

“At last,” Etta begins I can’t tell if it is the warmth of her soul or the revolutions per minute. Headlights turn and the trees begin to block my way home.

A gold wrapped promise hangs in the sky;
Not “Truth”, not “The Maker”,
just consequence, like drifting smoke,
just empty space and vapor.

Photograph by andrewjosephkatz

The waiters are running the kitchen.

The prisoners are running the prison.

The voters are running the government.

The actors are writing the scripts.

The player are calling the plays.

The virus is running the body.

The potatoes are cooking the oven.

The roses are ruining the garden.

I SCREAM (all caps) HELLO, HOW ARE YOU?

I wrote some haiku about my ex-girlfriend
but she tried to sue me for libel. My hand upon
the bible. I swear under the stench of oath

I wrote this under the influence of godly
incongruence and zero hours of sleep. My heavenly
mother tried to tell me that I must have written this

last night, but I don’t remember the pen, just a knife.
I tried to cut my wrists but realized the mic wouldn’t catch
the sample, the sound of the simple slit of suicide;

no, the blood dripping upon electronics wouldn’t suffice.
So I wrote this, unedited, upon a stone tablet
like some lost commandment chiseled just to perform

in front of an audience that might not understand it,
but hell, everything religious is insular and sublime
even if written in some less-than rigorous rhyme

for a flock to reach in pockets and throw money
spontaneously because some subliminal spirit
told them to. I wrote this on all fours. It ends prostrate.

I wrote this for myself. How are you? (One take.)
I wrote this fifteen minutes ago when my ex-girl
broke up with me. I mumbled this into the mic.

So, I show up at your door. It’s snowing.

Middle of the night, two a.m.

I pound on the door.

You wake, come downstairs, open up

and I’m standing there.

I have my pants around my ankles.   _____ And

there is just blood everywhere.

In the snow

My groin is this shivering steaming wound.

And I explain that I castrated myself

with garden shears and

…I dunno what I did with my dick…

_ I just set it down somewhere…

_____y’know, whatever…

and you would be totally like “AGGH”

And I would be like

“I knew you of all people would understand.”

___Oh the look on your face… woo!

Here sits a dark night of lurking shuddups

Wandering the house twitching

__at myself, bitching

My dirty assembly caught chemical

_______to the textured of boiled yams.

mushroom children stuffed into the belly of a casserole,

___cooked up until the wet fur smells.

conversations are like we’ve covered the kitchen ceiling

____in plastic wrap

conversations are like a sloshing wombful of fish

junk butt fuck chuckling buckle chuckets.

chuckle buckets

buckets of chuckle buckets

buckley buck chuckling fuckets
I am a bold lover.

Bold.

So very boldly bold, as a lover should.

Ah but as bold a lover as I

there was none more so bold than The Schlansky.

Man, could he ejaculate

The Schlansky had a signature move,

which was

The Schlansky.

The Schlansky’s The Schlansky is admittedly

__________an immature tact to take

______but

when one is primed for sweet sweat making

and one’s lover is refusing affections, again,

The Schlansky

is an effectively vindictive way of dealing with

___that frustration.

The Schlansky described The Schlansky simply as

___angry, audible masturabation.

Right there in bed.

Start off discrete and easy. Work it up slow,

But then

__Put on a real show. Get vigorous!

Lots of spit.

Talk to it!

Then finish it up with an orgasm

that sounds like you are pulling a live eel out of your throat

If done accurately,

__The Schlansky should be veritably pleasureless

fuck butt chuckling buckle chuckets.

chuckle buckets

junkets of fuckle chuckles

junkley buck chuckling fuckets

chutt uck juck futtley fuckel – uckl – ets.

_________________sshu uhtp

There in line at the market,

I see you.

_________You love and cradle your baby.

You whispers to the baby, and I can hear you

“You don’t know how bad I want to get drunk.

I am so tired I can see through walls.

I want to run away.

I want my pubic hair twisted and pulled”

You are strewn out in the bathroom around the toilet.

___Conversation and music crash outside in the hall.

You animate and clambers up to the toilet lip

and vomits,

you vomit through your hair
It’s just words to make

a sucking sound,

__as

oxygen ignites

_____black spastic orange horns

and you are at no party

and there were never Never any children,

you are covered in grease

____you are on fire

But I’m just drifting from room-to-room

____stopping to acknowledge it

__and whisper into the corners.

Kinda doing this –

__pull hair stumble around stareing

I drag a sloshing garbage bag of my organs,

my guts to the bathroom.

I grow gills and

I wait for something to spill.
I find I have raw gnawed my finger’s nails

nibbled the nails raw

Now -

random bites

on fingers, then hands, wrists

bloody nips, barely teeth marks,

flaps ripped removed,

my hands covered in

little red ovals, little angry red snears

You notice my blood

but

I don’t care about the pain

I don’t think I care about not caring.

What is to me? Any of it?
But you think I ought too.

After all isn’t that normal, to avoid pain?

___Healthy.___ Expected. ______Responsible.

Being human.

Not just deadpan.

Not lingering.

I’m going to murder you all night with that face.

       “Kobolds,” he grunts like a wrestling taunt. “Nurse got that
       certain something. She my queen o’ the O.” 3)Focal point
       of suffocation. “Can’t breathe in here, these digs are getting too
       hot. Oh the carbon monoxide. Nurse got that pillow-kill look
       in ze eyez.” 4)Direct correlation between

violence and intercourse. 5)Vibration fixation. “My ax
to pick, my brake too quick: Doc’s skull I could rattle now
between birth and earthquake. 6)Autoerotica. Nymphoneur-
osis. “Baby makeup. Clothes off. The lotus petal. The car grill.
Singing My Chere Amor.

       Diablo horny. Dialect deep r&b.” 7)Passion for song and
       dance, especially oldies. Doc finds the suffix, the title. Diagnosis:
       Sadosuffixatory-Nymphoneurosis-Mythicmalia. Drops the pen
       to listen: “This world is Tonk. Fame feeding frenzy. My dick’s
       a richter scale for celebration.

G is for gloryspot, if you didn’t grasp that before. Good
gracious, the bottomfeeder, the godhole. The thumbbutton.
The blue moon misunderstanding. The grave. The orgasm. The fix.
Diagnosis: biped. That’s all I got left. Two legs. A stick
figure fucking the shadows.”

Photograph by xtoq

To My Fellow Americans,

In response to the terrorist attacks
on September 11, 2001 in NYC and Washington, DC
by Arabic individuals
and to help the ongoing fight in Iraq, Afghanistan and Iran,
and to help fight the ongoing cultural invasion of the Islamic culture

I promise to do the following

1) I will no longer refer
to coffee as coffee but rather
black strong drink
because black strong drink was
invented by the Arabs.

Nor will I ever go to a café but rather a
black strong drink place.

2) I shall no longer say or
acknowledge the number between 1 and –1
in fact I shall no longer use Arabic
numerals again.
I recommend that we use Roman Numerals
for simplicity’s sake.

III) I will no longer dispense candy at Halloween but rather
sweet things, sometimes covered in chocolate.
Nor will I ever again sherbet,
smoke hashish,
or drink alcohol.
Now, I will stand here before you and state
I will disband my harem.

IV) I will burn thousands of afghans in the street
you know the ones,
they are in your living room and
on your couches

God-Damn those rugs!

V) There’s meat for sale and it’s Afghan
those little dogs are going to get what they deserve.

In closing fellow Americans,
I urge you stop using words derived
from the land between Africa and Asia

I also urge you to report any words suspected
of coming from that location to
the Webster’s English Dictionary Division of
the Homeland Security Department.

Thank You.