bruh, *******! it’s useless.
i’m moving to nantucket, massachusetts.

ill pack my bags
and my ol doorags

and you better believe
I’ll bring Roofus,

formerly known
as the family pug —

smugly, he rests his ugly mug snugly on mine.
we think we’re better off on our own.

children fill their lonely nights with conjured monsters,
mothers fill their lonely nights with men;
me, i fill my lonely nights with winding words of whining,
finding solace in my fertile, pacing pen.

"i'm awful."
you say it like a plead,
like you're begging me
to disagree.
"i don't think
anyone's awful,
not even
lee harvey oswald,
dude was just
ill"
is not the answer
you wanted,
you're crying.
"you think i'm like
lee harvey oswald?"
what
no

i eat some dirt for nutrients
but some worms crawl into my mouth
their guts erupt like mount vesuvius
they're in my throat now, get them out!

but then i choke, and soon i'll croak,
the worms spread through my sinuses
and all because i was too broke
to buy some ******* vitamins.

I brought Patsy to Petsmart for a while
and walked her through the aisles.
I bought her a new collar for ten dollars
so that she could strut with style.

We went to Wendy's for dinner
and she got ketchup on her feathers.

Will I go to hell
if I fed my chicken
chicken fingers?

"A new dawn has dawned upon us,
like a spawned epiphany.
Spring has sprung, the snow has melted;
I've known love, but never felt it.
The gloom has gone, our days are brighter,
yet I've never been more tired.
Here we go again, like hamsters,
spinning in our endless wheels.
A brand new season, a brand new cancer -"

"Chill," she says. "Drink some chamomile."

last night, i met a *****.
a pretty one, in heels.
it is clear, furthermore,
that she has no regard
for the hearts she plunders,
or the lonesome souls she steals.
she fell asunder like a split tree
struck lucky by thunder
and unlucky by me.

that girl is so lovely,
though she doesn't show it;
that girl, she made love to me,
though she doesn't know it.

there is a look my mother wears
when she bears bad news,
like she is sorry to be speaking.
she reeked of sorrow and cheap *****;
her voice is ugly when its squeaking.
tears were flowing easy like good writing when she shut the door.
i took a bath to ruminate, and then i took a shower too,
i scrubbed and sobbed and scrubbed some more,
but nothing could clean me of you.

if you are afraid of boats
and afraid of swimming,
afraid of fighting a shark and
afraid of winning,
grow up.

me, fossil
you, archaeologist.

a lil ol man in shorts; hell yeah. he rocks
back and forth, sittin in his rockin chair.
the moon’s unmoving, the man is grooving
to the tune of stars and shooting
aliens with his arms (which are guns);
pow, kablammo, ow, kablammo, pow pow.

From the beach I grabbed a girl
Who said she wouldn’t tell.
She was a precious pearl,
Trapped inside my oyster shell.

Next time I struck,
I stuck those ****
Into garbage bags
And the garbage bags
Into my truck

Wet from rain, I smoked a cig
down to the filter;
It was official!
I was a killer.

I murdered several more in between
But those memories exist for me
To relive in my quiet dreams.
The only one you need to know is
My final victim, Samantha Koenig.

I sewed her eyelids open wide
To take a ransom picture
And then I went inside
With my family to eat dinner.

They caught me in Texas; I was done
In by her credit card
Which I'd stolen from
Her boyfriend’s unlocked car.

I said, if my daughter doesn’t have to know
That I killed a bunch of worthless hoes,
I’ll tell you where the others are.

But before the beans could spill,
I wrapped my hands around my throat
In the small comfort of my cell
Until my labored breathing stilled
And I made my merry way to hell.

find a dream demon in the sizzle of your fried egg
in the fruit of your loops
in the balance
of your breakfast,
and swallow him
down with orange juice.

find him in your last pistachio
crack him open,
find him waiting,
find him
kind of hot

he looks real ripped,
red skin and
red tinted sunglasses.
“aw ****,
those gains,”
you wanted to say,
but were afraid.

wake up and find
that u lowkey miss him

'How I love you, how I do!'
Said the hammock to the noose.
'Thank you kindly, much ado,'
Fled the bluebird from the goose.

Then said the bonnet to the bee:
'I've been there for you all along,
I'm so patient, caring, strong;
Why's it that you don't love me?'

'Sting I must and sting I do.
I have my reasons – good ones too.
This doesn't mean I don't love you.'

is to be a fleeting,
flea-ridden faithful servant,
content and ignorant of injustice.

it is to die like a blade of grass:
ignorantly
and without much regret.

scrubbing the grime from my skin,
cutting my nails with a knife,
plucking the hairs on my chin,
oh my god, this is the life.

taking care of yourself is in style
and being hygenic is fun;
shower just every once and a while,
and dry off well when you're done.

i pick big scabs from my flat ***
and brush my teeth until they're white.
daily, i eat eyeballs en masse
in hopes of improving my sight.

being hygenic is fun
and taking care of yourself is in style.
this body is your only one
so treat it gently like a crying child.

when I show him to you, your forehead
is enveloped in creases —
“he has to go,
he probably carries diseases.”

“But don't you like this guy?”
“I mean, he seems kind of useless,
and how will you feed him,
he looks kind of toothless.”

(this is when I knew
not to associate with you,
'*** you were absolutely
goddamnfuckingclueless.)

“Really…?” I ****,
to which you only nod.
I shrug: “Well, to me,
he’s a little green God.”

a poem a day
will turn you gay

a poem a day
keeps the ***** away

Great, another Bukowski dickrider (me).
We get it, your substance abuse issues are your muse,
And you're very,
Very misunderstood.

my head emptied
as though bathwater down a drain, and i became simpler:
than the children kicking and screaming and skinning their knees on mulch,
than the cars coming and going and crashing and catching dead bugs in their killer windshields.

suddenly, ripples were spreading gently through the sky
like it was a body of water, being stirred to life by the clouds
like they were the fluffy fingers of a kid poking at his fish bowl,
and i started wondering what a sky even was
and if it could be the ground
if i sought to somehow stand on it.

i sat in the grass, plucked out its longest blades
like i was a brush tearing hair from the scalp of the earth,
started weaving little green bracelets, like I'd done as a boy,
and i did it until the sun had started to go down,
unable to connect the sky’s slow setting
to a passing of time.

bad poems
are like children:
abundant and
abundantly
annoying,
but unlike kids,
bad poems
never die.

Little green men,
on the streets;
eating fake meats
and bumping sick beats.

You need, indeed, a man, or steed,
a stallion of the purest breed, of course -
You need a muscled, manly horse -
A thoroughbred will do so nicely.
So here’s what I suggest you do:
Give up. Horses are quite pricey,
and clearly men don’t like you.

-Wisdom William

There are stars in his fridge
that stink up his food
as though they are clusters of rotting milk chunks
amongst other junk.
No longer able to eat a meal
that doesn’t taste like outer space,
he gets so fed up he eats them,
and they taste so bad he pukes them.
Peering into murky toilet bowl water,
he can make out the faint twinkling
of a regurgitated star.

i am running out
of patience and time
of money and ****
of my house naked

i am a product
of bad parenting
of good parenting
so buy me

I am a man in the woods
I am a saint amongst squirrels
I am
sitting high in a tree,
giggling, pelting twigs at hikers
but only the girls

I mostly eat sticks
but there's been a stick shortage
sometimes i use mud and *** to make porridge
but for some weird reason
it makes my **** orange

fellas, my eyelids are folding inwards
and so are my innards
but i shat out some dirt earlier
so at least we have dinner
<3

how to write wit that resonates?
how can i break through to you?
what if i can't satiate
the reader's need for gloom and doom?
perhaps i want to write about
my dog and not my misery.
he's got a tiny snout! i shout.
he's small, yet long! i declare,
but no one seems to ******* care.

steady the vicissitudes of existence
with whatever variety of vices!
distract from facts and deaths and doubts.
run to ****; away from crisis;
walk the path of least resistance,
until your feet are giving out!

i can be found
crawling around,

pitifully, painstakingly
picking **** from the carpet,

thinking
of you,

of quitting
my job,

of calling
you up,

of calling
in sick,

of beating
my ****,

but i never
do.

what the hell is this 'oof' ****?
i want to bond with my son,
but i still don't know what a 'boof' is.

my son is vindictive; is 'fort-night' addictive?
****'s sake, i feel like a ******!

When did you first start loving soup?

He considers this. “When i was around six.”

What was the first soup you fell in love with?

“Chicken noodle soup.” He says this as if it is blindingly obvious, and maybe it is.

Do you have any aspirations, soup wise?

“I have really wanted minestrone soup recently.”

What is that?

“It’s like really good.”

Oh.

“Yeah.”

a baby's foot
mom's womb

the soccer ball
the shoe

store owner staring
at shoplifter

a *******
his wife

it kicks
in

fur crusting over with blood,
entrails pouring from a gap
in its gut, the cat laid supine
with an indiscernable
emotion frozen on its face.
georgia watched from behind us,
crossing-uncrossing her arms.
Is he dead yet, are you done?
i thought so, but prodded it
to be sure. some blood seeped out;
it lay still as the surrounding air.
Gentler with the knife, she said.
i responded, Why’s it matter,
it’s dead, you know? and stabbed it.
‘*** you’re gonna make me cry!
No use crying over it,
i said; she cried for a while.

you are the emotional equivalent
of an empty bladder.

it was some time in the mid 90’s and
i was six,
playing with one of those little plastic phones
when she beckoned me over
to her armchair,
which i was afraid of,
in fear it would swallow me
up like it did her,
but i climbed into her lap anyway and
she smoothed my dress,
held my small hand in her wrinkled one,
closed her eyes and
then opened them
at the last second.
she went still,
looking quite disappointed in herself.

the captain
of the S.S. box
steers her ship
into murky waters.
here comes a fish;
she eats it.

“gas your trash paintings of jesus’ head
and exchange your cross for some cash.
It’s a known fact that god is dead; we fought,
he and i -  bashed, he passed,
simply automatic, undramatic as that.
I yelled to the sky, “the guy is gone, at last!”
I danced on his grave and bade his descent,
and the next holy role call, he was marked absent.”
-Hehehehe in Hell

“just shut it, satan,
you are the worst.
i’m writing a poem,
go eat some dirt.”
-Wisdom William

The floorboards of my psyche
creak, aching to be seen.
None perceive beneath skin deep,
which continuously treads on me.

Finding voluntary grasp
on reality repugnant,
I made a momentary lapse
of judgement, which collapsed
into sustained abundance.

You don’t like to be arranged -
strange; I don’t think many would.
Just because you can change, though,
doesn’t mean you should.
Doing so, there’s a good chance
that you’ll remain misunderstood.

My cat has apparently
decided to turn my house into a graveyard for rodents.
They turn up everywhere -
my tub, my sink, my bed -
but they all look so similar
that it could very well be the same mouse,
finding its way back in
every time I throw it out.

My cat looks proud of himself.
I ask, “When are you gonna stop?” and
“Why’d you have to put it in the toilet?”
But he can’t answer
through a mouthful of mouse fur.

the strangest sight does not perturb me
the strongest wind can not rustle me
i have seen the grass grow and die
i've seen the vultures feast and fly
i am a helpless standerby

i tip my hat
to the crows who land on my shoulder as if to say,
"you do not scare me,"
for i do not mean to.

My mother informed me
That Fireball the horse
Had passed on a temperate Fall night.
She'd waited to tell me
Till I'd finished my course,
And assured me things at home were alright.
We'd called him Fireball because his chestnut velvet
Glinted auburn in the morning sun,
And endowed with a massive pelvis,
He kicked hard as a hot son of a gun.

Fireball was just like Dad,
In that, if you, weary, had ever needed a lift,
They'd both have carried you on muscled backs.

Grief ridden in the big city, I grew ill.
A meddlesome misery settled unkindly
As I thought still of Fireball fondly.
Then a thought dawned upon me:
If Heaven's so mighty,
How will Fireball find me?

Here she comes, a runaway train

I chase her, pleading
Please, baby
Take me back!

She doesn't hear me,
(She is a train)
And speeds off.

poems are snippets of wasted time;
a collection is a shattered clock.
even a good poet
is a poor one
and especially doomed
when writing about writing.

god is not a man in robes,
god is not at beck and call;
god is not your telephone.

god is i, me, you, and all,
god is everyone you meet;
god is winter, summer, fall,

god is snowfall, blizzard, sleet,
god is love and war and famine,
god is scorching desert heat.

god is in your fish, your salmon,
god is the meat between your teeth;
god is in the sea he swam in.

The best people
are just the least bad people.

You can touch my body,
but never me.

The reality is:
I spend all my time avoiding it.

There she goes again, weeping
Can't she see I'm trying to play Minecraft?

There she goes again, screaming
Banging her head into the floor
She's probably banging other men too

I said:
Maybe if you spent more time on dinner
You would have a healthy outlet
To distract you from these troublesome emotions
And there she goes again,
Weeping

mom whispered to me more than she prayed to god
about her first job and her secondandthird,
about how they found water on mars,
about the miracle of him coming back,
about “the doctors said you were dead
but here you breathe,
and if you are possible,
then so is he.”

she carried around
a bible in her purse,
“you never know
when you might need it.”
it was buried by Winn-Dixie receipts
and i’ve still yet to see her read it.

she drank salvation from a mason jar,
“this is
the blood of christ, you see.”
but it looked
a lot like wine to me.

My dad's old friends came round to our apartment sometimes,
would come round for some beer
and a guilty look at my mother’s ***.

Today, as usual, she let them track mud through our little house, cackling like hyenas
and pretending to admire the art on our walls.
She let 'em do it but then we all went out on the porch and they started to tell me, as mama looked on with pursed, painted lips,
bout the time my daddy’d -
well i never ever did find out what my daddy'd done
*** that's when she slammed down the case of beer
on the patio table.

All three of them paused to look at her.
It was like she’d turned them all off, with a button that she kept hidden in her *****.
for a second they realized how sad she must've been,
they realized he probably shot himself right upstairs
and then they looked at me
like I was a dead little boy
wearing my daddy's eyes.

I missed their merry smiles and table slaps punctuating each joke
wiping the sweat off their foreheads with their wrists and
leaning back in their chairs, flicking their lighters against their cigarettes and
savoring mouthfuls of chewing gum and dip,
'*** now they were still.

“Now don’t go tellin’ tales to John,” she said, and doled out a few drip-cold beers to shut them up.

They washed the stories down with her drink and just forgot about it,
or more likely,
they'd started thinking about that button
burrowed between my mother’s *******.