Tonight I am an astronaut
in between an old woman
who smells like ink, sudoku, and *****,
and a window with a full moon
that is held in the sky by a wing.

I'd like to tell her
what everybody thinks
when they fly.
I'd tell her
what it would be like
if we crashed
and I had to choose
between her
and myself.

Selfishly I would choose myself.
My mother could not outlive me.
Yet, she could be my mother's mother.
She could have seen the full moon
from the backseat of a Model T
or from her back in a desert
that is now Las Vegas or Phoenix
or full moons from ninety years or full moons.

But this plane will not crash
and I will not have to choose
yet I am still repulsed.
I'll too be old. Soon.
Tomorrow, maybe.
Yet, I promise
I will not smell of ****
or fly in a plane
without a seat
next to a window
so I could see the full moon
from outer space.

She gets high.
I get high.
She gets drunk.
I get drunk.

I get high.
She spills sapphire.
I get drunk.
She spills unleaded.

She gets high.
She gets drunk.

I get high.
I get drunk.

I slow down for you.
I am a tortoise.

I arrange caution tape
from one dream
to another
until I'm afraid
to remember dreams.

I have never seen a body turn from life to corpse
hung from a chapel or tree
or a two year old girl stop breathing
because mom can't afford food
or clothes torn off a man on fire in heat
as he stops drops dead  
with final thoughts of spring rolls
of laughter of the buffet filled
to the belly like bullets
in the chest when you can eat
no more fish she said
to write a poem as a fish
hooked and dragged
like ******* soda cans
on the back of a limousine
on your wedding day
off he goes out to the lake
to fish to socialize with Ted
his brother as strong as his fillet knife
I bite the jig and wear the hook
to the surface I gasp
thrash and hang from eight
pound test and turn from fish
to fish flesh as a fillet knife
empties my guts from gill
to tail.

Thaw

Today I cause erosion
I angle sand once perpendicular
to a half frozen lake
to a beachy slide
softened with shells
with starfish three hundred
miles away in an ocean
warm as the lips of a moray.

Earth stills below me
ten percent snow
thirty percent mud
fifty nine dirt
and one percent soles.
I carry a stick
I drag through earth
like a rudder through waves
and a clearing I swear
looks like it once
housed a UFO.

Remember the summer
in a three foot grass field
we used plywood and a rope
to make crop circles
that nobody would ever see
and had a fire
next to a creek and listened to water
scratch and sniff the shale.

Sometimes I wonder why
I write and what the reason is
for breaks and lapses in words
and writing and why I would write
about an Elvis pumping his neon
with unleaded and myself
at the pump across the way
with my eyes fixed on this Elvis
a forty something burnout
with too many relapses
who returns my stare and says
in the most average Elvis voice
"How ya doin"

How am I doin
I think to myself
okay and think about why I write
and why I would impersonate
an impersonator in words
for my own consumption
or for the one person I will have
read this or entertainment
or just a way to get from eleven
to midnight to one in the morning

it seems my dreams
have taken over
my life
I sleep like a dolphin
with one eye open

it rained yesterday
and i spent
three hundred dollars
on a ******* juicer.
because i think
like a goldfish
that forgets
every five seconds.  or is
that *******?
is it every three seconds?
but regardless
i know i can juice orange
and celery and apple
and a nice spice
like cinnamon
or ginger
to make the perfect drink.
**** it.
ill save three hundred
and by the perfect drink
every night
for two dollars
and fifty cents.
a *** and pineapple
or ***** tea
or sanity
and lime.
and talk to someone.
anyone i wish
about ****
and ****.
and ****.
****.

The most ****** colors
exist in flowers.
In orange lily
and white crocus petals,
colors that arouse insects
into an ecstasy of pollination.

Have you ever seen a bee
make love to the pistil
and stamen,
or see a bee dance on anthers
as light as it's buzz?

I once saw a field of sun flowers
never take their eyes off the sun
while a weightless hummingbird
kissed each one on the stigma
with eyes fixed on the yellow
of the flower it loved
for just a moment.

Rubber faces.  Foreheads sweat, stream clown makeup when cheeks meet.  Sweet blood: corn syrup, water, starch.  Lick then smell.  Vampires pick jolly rancher debris from teeth.  Blue fangs.  A skeleton in the closet undresses a nun.  Open door open window sit three cats.  Watch the sun set.  Crows murdered around oak trees.  Darkness.  Lights, music, karaoke, Elvis sings Franki Valli.  Richard Nixon gropes a slutty nurse.  Left hand, right breast.  Alcohol permeates air.  Skin, sweat.  Touch.  Marilyn Monroe hoards candy corn souped with beer broth in her stomach.  Passes out.  Steve Irwin wears a sting ray through his chest, ***** tail through his shirt, surrounded in blood.  First place in the costume contest.  Alter egos.  Fred Flintstone feels snubbed.  So does a saran wrapped girl.  ******* hidden with black fabric circles.  Black balloons.  Orange ones.  Red balloons.  Popped.  Silent girl in white stands in the corner.  Caresses a small bottle of cyanide in her fingers.  Thumb, middle, pointer, pointed at Marilyn.  She knows she will not wake up.  They’ll call it suicide.  Elvis finishes his song in a falsetto,
Oh, what a night.

If I was a witch
I would split the Earth
thousands of miles away
into good and bad and **** the oppressed.
If I was a witch
I would see red rats
gnawing week old carcasses
and talk to house cats.
If I was a witch
I would ask a cat
Can you help me summon
the ****** or a demon
engulfed in fire red as rats?
If I was a witch
the cat would answer
Sure, would you prefer
Lucifer or Volond?
Perhaps ****** or Old Scratch?
If I was a witch
I would not care
what a devil or demon spoke to me
or how hot his igneous breathe was
when he said
I'll help you take Salem
one farmer at a time.
If I was a witch
I would change my name
from Tituba
to Agatha
and boil broth
morning sunset to night sunrise.

I sit and pick seedlings from the earth like chicken from my teeth.  My eyes stay closed.  I feel the green of maple seeds, crashed helicopters.  I smell death.  Behind me he slaughters chickens.  Stretches their necks on a tree stump.  Butcher knife guillotine.  Heads pile in a once white bucket.  I pick my teeth blind.

Birds in nests and worms
in birds in nests sing songs
in a tree above me.

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0100010
1001010

0101010100101­0
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1

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0

I walked to school in the snow
up to my knees
like an acrobat trapezed
from snow angel to man
to summers
as humid as saunas
but we still rode bikes
and played ball in heat
and jumped off bridges into the canal
in front of retired fisherman
who wore straw hats and smoke pipes
like snowmen and they ice fished
in the harbor where we skated
and sprayed snow on each other
until the ice cracked
in spring thaw
where bass spawn
and they fished
and we swam
until fall.

I never thought that someone could love
communication more than Telsa.

Then I saw Jessica texting:

pounding keys
a sweaty finger moves around
in circular motions,
the phone vibrates
opens in anticipation,
more fingers dance
on the soft buttons
that light up
with every tap,
a final send,
an ****** of relief
as she shuts the phone
and takes a deep breath.

A rhombus is my favorite, crooked square.
I like haunted houses with windows with faces
and fun houses with mirrors that oval circles
that distort my body two hundred degrees.

I like haunted houses with doors at right angles,
and half moon neon protractors
that blur every shape zero degrees.  
I like cubes I stack four cubes high.

I like half moon neon protractors
and scientific calculators.
I like cubes I stack ten cubes high
and old houses with ceilings that creak.

I like scientific calculators
and dividing eight billion by pi.
I like old houses with ceilings that creak
with cylindrical cans filled with old beets.

I like dividing eight billion by pi
and fun houses with mirrors that stretch right angles.
I like old houses with crooked windows,
like I said a rhombus is my favorite.

When Mars attacks
I'll be in Oregon
eating saltines
and everything bagels
washed down
with orange Tang
while you're probed
anally with a green stick
the size and shape
of a bottle of Bud
in downtown Tallahassee.

After the attack
I'll go fishing
in Crater Lake
and catch twelve
rainbow trout
or kokanee salmon
and fillet them
one by one
while you limp
and buy chairs
with extra pads
and change the gauze
at the base
of your ****.

His throat opened under stale wind
and screamed sharp sounds like fish fin
pricked and cut soft hand tissue.
The bruise was a pinch because
the eye can only see what was
there before the attack surprise.

He performed dog magic in Prague
under willows but lacked
important mastery techniques.
Turned rock to frog but not back,
simply a half witted magi
ruined like slapped sewn hide leather.

Crisped under hot red sun he
shakes in his boat like maracas
he curves with blue currents to shore.
With a boat in the mud jammed rudder
he stares at clouds hugs himself
and sees a rock kiss a frogs belly.

Walter was history's best fisherman -
history's best minnow fisherman.
He combed and cleaned his net
like a lint trap or a summer screen door
so delicate, seaweed fibers, mussel shells.
He fished more of a dance, a twirl
his arms up and down and around and always
spun in the shallows like a waterspout
he would glide his butterfly net through the lake
and capture little fish he placed
into a sand castle bucket filled halfway with water
he would always pour back into lake.
He was strictly a catch and release fisherman.

All the mothers on the beach would stare
at Walter and his water waltz and at his mother
who stood next to him so he wouldn't fall.
It was hard not to stare at Walter
always alone with his aged mother
and he had to be at least a teen by now.
Perhaps it was hard to tell, autism doesn't age well,
but we had been beach regulars for fifteen years
and Walter and his mother had for ten.

The last time I saw Walter he danced and fished.
I laid on the beach with my cousin and we observed
his patterns and his mother his rock who stood there
for ten years with the minnow fisherman.
The next day my own mother cried
more than when her own mother passed
and she told me, she died
Walter's mother died

Even now I stand in the shower skin deep in water
and think about where Walter is now.
I see him in my mind dancing in some bath tub
with a butterfly net in some foster home
without a mother to break his fall.

In 55 Bukowski wrote of severed *****
while Rosa Parks decided not
to sit in the back.
Not a hacksaw but a rusty tin can.
Can you imagine?

Here's a true story, mind you
I was negative thirty three years young
then when Emmett Till was killed.
"In God We Trust"

Fifty four years later
Iranian protesters shot,
the King of Pop drops dead.
If they knew it then,
Elvis would have had to do more
than just shake his hips

While Eisenhower played pocket pool
in line at McDonald's,
true stories fluttered from feather pens
turning page into prose page.

I want a Clarence and Alabama kind of love.
I want a call girl with hardly enough experience
to fall for me,
not a *****,
there's a difference.
I want a girl who would drop everything and go
with me anywhere
with more ******* than Sigmund Freud could dream of
and believe in everything I did
no matter how purple my car is.
I want a girl who doesn't care
that only fools rush in
and knows there is nothing cooler than Elvis glasses
and triple kung fu features.
I want a girl who tastes like a peach
and knows how to utilize a phone booth
without dialing a number.
I want a girl who would ****
Tony freaking Soprano,
burn his face off like a vampire's in the sun,
just to see me again.
I want a girl to move with me to Mexico
and name our son after the king of rock n roll
who only cares about living fast, dying young,
and leaving a good looking corpse.
I want a girl
to tell me
You're so cool!

****** bone feathers and yellow beak imbedded in brain
exposed an aviary corpse when the burial dust settled
the last Dodo fell with eighty eight avocado trees cut
down that day and they fell like tipped cows slow
slow fast thud dirt sprayed like winter breath
but before trees tumbled and avocados
rolled downhill north sawteeth
scratched bark and cut
at one hundred fifty
degree angles
and wedges
pried tree
trunks
while the last Dodo slept in the last inhabited Dodo nest
like the last of a long genealogy abhorring what was left
of a final family

a weak decrepit Jones or Smith
tumbles down stairs
of a two story home
in Maine.

You act like an orca
tanning on the beach:
ignoring life
for beauty and recognition,
but only in oceanic swells
is the orca beautiful
and recognized
while it lives it's own life
chasing sea lions
and the air above waves.

She sleeps naked
on top of her sheets
in the summer
and early autumn.
At night tan lines appear
around her ******* like pockets of daisies
patched in grass fields.
Her dreams glide on a warm breeze
from the window left of her toes
to the one above her head.
Tonight she dreams of travel,
of Columbus, being the only woman
on the Santa Maria when it falls
off the edge of a flat Earth
into Neptune's orbit.
She awakes face down
painted in clear sweat
along her spine
to the smell of dry leaves
clung to her window.

More than ***
with Anne Hathaway,
more than tic tac toe
with John Malkovich,
I need a ******* sandwich.
Wheat white rye I don't give a ****
give me whatever loaf you have
grains wheat
flour water
make me bread and stick
some meat in between.
Anything
roast beef
capicola
ham

wait

ham *****.

Anything but ham,
it reminds me of Mia.
Give me mustard
yellow like **** but tasty
not tested
give me ketchup
lipoproteins or fiber
lettuce tomatoes make it seem healthy
but layer it with mayo
saturate that fat
fill me up
with a ******* sandwich.

The smell of swiss fondue
a chocolate fountain
moist strawberries
angel food cake.
The smell of brunch buffet
apple turnovers
honey sliced ham
bacon and eggs.
The smell of exhaust
as we walk
to the chapel
up Oliver Street.
The smell of flowers
rainbowed daises
heart shaped lilies
a single red rose
on the broach
of your six year old
brother.
The smell of family
friends neighbors.
The smell
of your six year old
sister
beautiful Easter dress
sky blue ribbons
silk bonnet
blonde hair
smooth skin embalmed
because leukemia
doesn't smell.
Today
we will all
believe in God
or pretend
at least
for you, her sister,
her mother,
her father,
her twin brother,
and for Ruthie,
her chest buried
in tear soaked flowers
in a four foot casket.

The curves on a brachiosaurus
make Queen Latifah seem like a beach towel.
The jaws on a tyrannosaurus rex
make Jay Leno augment his chin.
The spikes on a stegosaurus
make Travis Barker shave his head.

Latifah Leno Barker
hunt for dino flesh
like aboriginals
chase mammoth with sticks
stones and fire dances.


Yeah, I'd pay to see that.

I drove the rental car through a tree
as we continued on towards the ranch.
Saddled up hand measured horses and rode through the park.

Monster trees would have shadowed skyscrapers.
The bravest of birds nested only halfway,
for even feathered wings stall at that altitude.

The damnedest thing was the pine-cones,
golf ball-sized spheres
falling from giants.


It's a bumpy ride on a leather saddle,
a bit painful, too.
You smirked and said you needed a drink,
hell, so did I.

Later in Eureka California we walked to Ray's Saddle,
an old western bar with a wooden red patio,
fake cowboy mannequins gracing the entrance
pistols drawn, not ready to fire.

Our dry mouths megan to irrigate,
our sore bottoms limped through the door,
and the damnedest thing;
the bar stools were rawhide saddles.

I ate your spinach
because it was there
and you, like an anorexic rabbit,
ignored it, and motioned to my plate.
You said,

How can you go on
living like a priest
in a *******?
Temptation after temptation,
yet still you stay celibate,
your tissues clean of *****,
your hands folded above the waist,
as calloused as your traveled feet.

When does the bird fall it's offspring from the nest
in a spring with a shortage of worms?

I have no idea
what it is like
to be *****.
I can't imagine
cooperating
while a man
thrusts his *****
inside of me.
Or even worse,
not cooperating,
and while I kick,
scream, and claw,
he yells ****
and treats me
like he would
a grapefruit
or clementine -
peeled and devoured.

I have no idea
what it is like
to have been *****.
I can't imagine
telling anyone
I was used
or I was tortured
and bled and cried.
Or even worse,
seated in a court
surrounded by people
who have come to know
everything about my body
and psychological well being
as the man
who ***** me
sits in a Calvin Kline suit
twenty feet away
behind a cherry table.

Five hundred feet from Terrapin Point the Birdman stands with his bicycle.  His face as flat as the quarters he begs for, glares at foreign tourists.  Two boisterous parrots, Larry and Mabel.  They smell like tourists and change, and are footcuffed to three brass chains connected to his backpack.  A Muslim family approaches.  They want a picture.  Birdman places the birds on the hands of the smallest boy, and his mother takes a picture.  Mabel squirms.  Larry squawks.  Click.  A reward for their posturing, Birdman places birdseed on his tongue, and the parrots peck away, ignoring his birdbreathe for an evening snack.  The tourists clap and laugh at Birdman and toss him their spare change.  Birdman stands.  Waits.  For another family to pose with his birds.

Mabel licks her wings
and Larry says, "Picture pic."
Birdman stands alone.

Have you ever seen a male

narwhal

swimming through the ocean

with a ten foot

(foot foot foot foot foot foot foot foot foot foot)

tusk?



Next time you moan and ***** about

your nose
being too big;

Remember them.


They can't even smell.

If a single apple were to tell a story
of my mother's kitchen,
it would go something like this:

Recently removed
from my mother's stem,
moved inside from out,
cord cut, window shut,
I sit on the stove
and wait.

I am a single apple
too green for a sauce,
too small for a pie.
I sit alone wondering
why I was chosen.

Yes, I am a philosopher, Applestotle,
sitting next to a pool of grease,
grease from the roast pork,
and I wonder,
why was I chosen?

In walks a woman.
Oh yes, a woman in the kitchen,
doing dishes.
I'm not a sexist.
It's just a coincidence.

Her stoic lips
go in for the ****
and the last thing I remember,
is her carbon breath,
as I tasted the bony structure of her teeth.

Perhaps it's the way his colostomy bag hangs
off his waist like John Wayne's pistol in Rio Bravo,
or the trail of **** left when it ripped last Monday
from his chair to the refrigerator.
He must have noticed,
he turned right and filled the sink with feces
and called over the nurse.
She pioneered along the trail,
and fit him with a new bag.
More **** oozed
through the tube
filling a fresh bag.

I sat there and licked
my nasal drip into my lips,
hoping the sparkle of my snotty glossy shine
would catch your eye,
like your favorite **** rag
in a line up of church bulletins.

The putrid lavender like scent
swimming through the air like flying fish,
allows me to dream
quicker than any drug.

I dream of the day where we both lay naked
with our old wrinkled skin connected like praying hands
where your feces and ***** flow freely to fill in epidermic gaps.

Seven sit around a fire,
burnt marshmallows on two foot sticks
stuck between grahams,
talk *** and film.

Had her naked like Kate Winslet,
not Titanic Kate,
but Little Children Kate.
**** on the washing machine
behind Jennifer Connelly's back.

But the part about Madame Bovary,
who really needs feminist literature in a feminist film?
Okay, maybe it's classic romantic...

I felt lost like a pebble
sinking in the ocean
five miles deep
in the Puerto Rican trench.
I hadn't seen either movie
nor was I well versed
in feminism or romance.

My mind drifted to my first time.
Started with a french kiss
from a Latina girl,
at a house on Cleveland Ave,
I wish I could remember more.

The moon doesn't seem so far away
when I lay in midnight grass with you.
I want to reach up, flick it,
and play pinball in the stars,
or better yet put it in my pocket
along with Mars and gift them to you -
intergalactic stress *****.
From above we probably look
like a capital M cut right down the center
in two symmetrical halves.
I wished upon a star
that you would grab my hand
like I know you would
if we took off into space.
If I could take you anywhere
I would take you to Mercury
where we could reach out
and touch sunspots.

But I can't
and you're suspicious of me
because you don't even know me.
Maybe, though, one day
you will wrap your fingers
around my palm
and squeeze ever so lightly
like you would hold a mouse
and ask me my favorite song.

next to prime rib
is a miniature fir
or bush
lumberjacked at
the trunk
you press like a bobblehead
plugging nostrils with green
steam and shake and
nobody wants to spitspoil red meat
and everyone agrees
so you collect veggie trees
arrange them in a forest
and reenact little red riding hood
with a cherry tomato
you bite -

you ******* werewolf
vampire where were you
when the fetus
crowned like a tulip pistil
harnesses by an umbilical noose
and the nurse paused and said
she's dead
and cried
and she cried too
while I waited with her father
her mother
and mine
and three friends
and nine months of this
for that
you ******* ******

not even john hancock
can sign a birth certificate
and a death certificate
in a nightmare
let alone in one night

Seven slugs ******* beer
from a bowl in their garden of Eden
rocking out to Miley Cyrus.
XM top 20 on 20
radio and gardening and slugs
swim like Phelps
but opposite
like life rafts
shriveling drunks
contorted and slimy
old school nickelodeon
green slime on your head
washing off in water
crossing bridges
entering temples

where the **** is the shrine of the silver monkey?

She screamed obscenities at the stars
and cursed them out
one by one.

But how do you offend a star?
You can't tell a star,
"Go **** yourself!"
Well, you can, but what good is that?
And honestly, who wants to see ****** stars
pleasure themselves?

You can tell a star,
"How about your core gains so much mass
that it can't stand your own weight,
so it implodes,
and then neutrons bounce off your inner core...
and you explode!"

But really,
how poetic is that?

Anyways she kept yelling and yelling,
expecting some response,
and I could only assume
she would not shut up.

Have you seen him
in Hollow Man?

Nope.

I was attacked by jellyfish.
Clear umbrellas
circus tents with mardi gras beads
hung down the side
like indian fringe
tentacles stretching stretching stretching stretching
and stopping.

And stinging.

Those mother smuckers
shooting venom
like Belushi shot ******
through my skin
Chinese acupuncture
sticky jelly arms sticking
plucked off suction cups
like fake tattoos rubbed off
with bare fingers
skin burned
a sixteen alarm salt fire
contained by ocean
no flame but pain
and water stings
the tickle from tentacle to skin
not even a fish
but a gillfree zooplankton
free from captivity
but caged to my skin
like a remora
those shark suckers
but I'm not a host
just prey in the way
for a swim in the gulf
or a walk on the shore
or a pet at the zoo
my chest my feet my hands
stung like ghost bees
not seen but felt
glossed with mud
this time tide sand
wet like tsunamis
mixed with vinegar
rubbed like bay leaves
under the nose
to relieve congestion
but on the wound
to relieve infection
my skin reddens
like rose bloom
from gypsum sands
and I want to sleep
sound as Beethoven
but wake again
like an immortal sea jellie
roaming every ocean
like De Soto or Marco Polo.

Marco

Polo

Marco

Polo

Fish out of water.

Sunday:
Ant Pills
Bear Traps
Cobra Feet

Monday:
Dolphin Lungs
Eel Soup
Frog Limbs

Tuesday:
Gecko Suits
Horse Pie
Inchworm ***

Wednesday:
Jaguar Barbed
Koala Beer
Lynx Lynch

Thursday:
Monkey Chips
Narwhal Fashions
Otter Drugs

Friday:
Porcupine Rehab
Quail Map
Roadrunner Piano

Saturday:
Slug Party
Turkey Slop
Urchin See

Sunday:
Vulture Guns
Walrus Tongues
X No

Monday:
Yellowjacket Fever
Zebra Clowns

Not even field mice can hide
from the smell of autumn grapes
that bind with air molecules
for the sweetest fragrance
that could never be replicated
by the best candle.

It's no wonder that trout
throw themselves above the stream
that runs through the vineyard
to get a taste of the concord
September aroma.

That's why the windows stay open
until the first frost bites the fields
and takes with it the purple air.

I killed Abraham Lincoln
and John F Kennedy.
I am a confederate soldier,
a United States marine,
a supremacist fugitive.
I killed Martin Luther King
and Robert F Kennedy.
I am a Palestinian immigrant.

Last Monday I went to the market
to buy fresh fruit,
ripe mangoes and bananas
you could smell from tables away.
Grapes red purple green
and I squished one between
my thumb and forefinger,
grape flesh the color of farm villas.
Melons pears peaches plums.
I am a fruit connoisseur.
I am a customer.
I am Mark David Chapman.
I killed John Lennon.

I killed your mother's brother
and a homeless woman.
I am Edgar Allen Poe's inspiration
for the Tell-Tale Heart.
I killed the old man
the young man -
any man.
I am anyone
anywhere
and I am armed.

You sit on the beach and pick at fish bone
after maggots and flies have had their way,
poke it with a stick, listen to the tide,
wonder what it sounds like underwater.
Whale songs, shark bites, seal birth, and coral
in a circus of clown fish, puffers, and lions.
I dig a hole to bury the carcass,
the bone, no flesh, you name him Sergio.
As the dolphin tide rolls in sand erodes
exposes the burial bone by bone
until it washes to sea like drift wood.

When we were young we captured frogs out back
in the creek in the woods behind your house,
and once I tripped into a small ravine.
We found door sized slabs of concrete or rock
engraved with names and nineteenth century dates.
Civil War gravestones, some professor said,
and they were moved somewhere to some museum.
Later on the news they interviewed us,
and in the background bulldozers dug holes
that exposed some two hundred year old bones,
skeletons and skulls, excavated from burial,
as we smiled to the channel two reporter.

I'm chasing a chupacabra through Mississippi
through mud thick like chocolate milkshakes
and rain soaked boots stick to my socks to my skin
I run around trees and zag and zig to navigate
a maze of horticulture past ferns and bushes
and it stops.

We're eye to eye
like two old lovers
spotting each other
from across a beach bar
except those bloodsucker eyes
could paint the Grand Canyon red
and nosferatu fangs
still warm from goat *******
could sizzle the sun.
Cobra tail whiplash
spotty patches of hair
the ugly duckling.

I aim my pistol at the beast and pull the trigger
like a civil war hero king of champion hill
and the bullet takes off at the speed of life
it penetrates the animal and blood sprays
out of the torso like a garden hose set on mist
and I run up to the almost dead chupacabra
and it barks
softer than balsa
whimpers of a new born
puppy tears
staining red eyes
and as loud as a mouse
it says goodbye
in dog