Word Whored

Poetry

photo by the author

~after William S. Burroughs, for the Poetry Police

The American cemetery is nothing
but coffee and blood,
drug addicts and info addicts
pouring their mucus membranes
full of battery acid for kicks,
sick yellow ghosts
caught in balloons
and tubes tethered to the sun.

Veins crawling with neon spiders,
a fix that hums like tinnitus
or a refrigerator stuffed with Coca-Cola
running in a bomb shelter or
a basement below the street
where JFK showed the world his brain.

These are the bites that glow
and pulse like liquid light.
These are the spiny tendril fingers
pointy and barbed with ticklish poison.
This is the American Dream
self-siphoning a hole
of Kool-aid laced gasoline.

I am Jack B. Nimble.
I am Jack B. Quick, of the Quicken and Loan,
son of Sam and a mouth
spilling rancid Quaker oatmeal
resembling liquified brains
or the last will and testament
of…