New Dead Families

HUMAN SHIELD

My mouth creatures an Oreo. The struggle of crumbs totally

soaked, to tiptoe out along horned, Predator-style

mandibular cantilevers while meeting my girlfriend’s parents

for the very first time. In hindsight, after getting to

know them, I wouldn’t have as luckily escaped mummification

in our conga line mid-fisting had I not inherited my grandma’s

hydroelectric genitalia. You can see why rain is actually a

waste of water.

I wouldn’t want to ever meet my doppelganger: imagine you’re

a midget, you’ve got green skin and pointy ears

and walk with a cane and wear some ratty burlap coat

thing and speak backwards and work at the

movie theaters; imagine yourself meeting motherfucking Yoda, and

imagine you both comparing assholes and being generally freaked out

at the difference.

From the mountain bike’s G-forces a nameless, unspeakable

evil turns cartilage sullen, like the way it looks, on

its bike, racing down alleys and hiding amongst trashcans

and as we’re shooting at it, me and a bunch of other cops,

it’s grabbing for the nearest clump of shit to utilize

as a human shield, and its claws grapple with discarded

lettuce and pick out a little pupa which the clawed evil entity

steals from the pupa’s mother’s loving embrace, with its claw,

and which it puts on its own back (the evil entity does) to act

as a human shield. Any – rather ductile and destructible –

wad of rubbery biology that can serve as a human shield which

blasted down, and which the more we shoot at it, looks more and

more like a dude on a couch, watching TV, in fact glazed in such

blight from watching TV all day as to actually more resemble a

lost meteorological figure.

I wish the shanty convenience store hadn’t been remodeled

into a big, vain robot staring the whole time at

its own reflection in a metal detector, he with the

heart of a hedonistic personal computer,

decoder of typo-strings and fan mail diagrams,

cruncher of things – lathered sometimes into a

numberless froth – but maker of exact folds and creases

in the more well-worded fan letters.

TRY TIDE

I’m one of the few microbes in the bathhouse whose underbite betrays intelligent introspection. I’m beginning to think that homicide cloys. It creeps all over you. When you try to shake it off it merely forms a raised edge, then settles again. Commences creeping again … Homicide is acrid. It is the splat that just does not blend in. It looks a little unused. Everything around it seems healthily used. You can tell when something is unused because of a black grain of sand sealed in. It stays the same age. A blowfish wanted to remain the same age and to that end ingested industrial fertilizer and now sports an off-color scrotal coxcomb. It had gained no extra powers. The little girl who served the soccer mom Tide from her lemonade stand did inadvertently impart a horrific power to the soccer mom, by giving the soccer mom Pink Eye, actually the Tide she ingested did, which she’d bought from the little girl, with which she’s ‘panning,’ quite brawnily, not looking in the normal sense but sort of roving, the eye does, in its pink rim, and tearing objects free of their natural platforms when the Eye passes over them. It must close. Then open again. Waking is mending.

TUNING FORK

down some lizard-way for adding wattage to the tableware, boosting time
in the broom closet a few surfacings north of some really, really rough dry cleaning, so I can show you my belly’s equatorial vents to show you how it does its mumblings, with a tincture to stop wormsong clotting, umbilical hydraulics recommended to keep its snorts cosmetically stuck, for more bass, thenceforth tactfully putting off the trajectory of its abortion

meanwhile the slouching figure of your uncle interrupts the radio’s evomition with onset scarecrow, which interruption’s death/bird-underarm odor relates custom-made to every angle of the radio’s respirator, a circus syndromatic imp caught in a fish net, your uncle’s head burns, trying to move towards the radio’s grille and crawl in to use the earth as ersatz bubble wrap, planet-induced lesions, the pauper’s classic outer layer…

“no long wave—can’t listen to me cricket!”

meanwhile in the broom closet gears grow square in sturgeon fat chain-smoked

into just another familiar cycle of organs quaking in arousal’s prolapsed bean, acting like the nurse would amputate its prehensile Martian sauce, the one so clearly built by its own aesthetics, unknown parts’ curvature revisited, apart from the one I listen to most frequently with the fork of suspended animation