New Poem for Jacob

Spontaneous combustion of several mystery elements

occurs in my brain as I huff on this duster

going "Woo Woo Woo"

I pass out for a minute

the car drifts off the road

my friend has to steer it

into the bushes

This the goal

not an abberation

we are playing a game

with a foregone conclusion

but that does not make it a failure.

Success most do not want

to understand my body

is a temple full of money changers

Jacob, Jacob

Can you hear me?

Last night I dreamed of you

exactly as you are as I love you.

I was walking in Philadelphia with two older women

I wanted to Impress

talking about Bukowski,

I was very very impressed

and I saw you, so simply,

I saw you

and could do nothing but fall

down flat on my nose

weeping laughing farting

you weren't even happy to see me

you were wearing headphones.

not much, almost nothing,

but this is what we have now,

empty pocketbooks and nothing to say

at least to each other,

our backs toward each other,

screaming on a dark slide

naked on a warm night

don't you remember.

Can you say you hate me?

You might even be angry

were you ever to read this poem.

That's why it's a good poem,

or at least that's where I am right now

in thinking about poems.

but if this does reach you,

know this,

the most beautiful poetic sequence

ever I have heard,

ever I could dream,

which I try but can't capture

is the movement of your voice

describing yourself falling

down the spiral of a phone cord.

A black phone, chained to the wall.

My whole life is but recollection

of dream congregations

all of my friends gather together

there are so many!

we are all shirtless, it is sweaty in the summer!

What it is that we gather around

cannot be seen,

but was once known to me,

or I believe that it was,

and will try forever to understand again

as simply as I did in that picture.

It's somewhere in my drawer,

underneath the socks,

next to the pot,

a book mark in the bible

dutch oven of mourning

Loss

Recently I have lost a lot of things in my life. So it goes, as they say. But in light of this, Butchered Switch would like to present a poem that is, gasp, nostalgic? Remember though, nostalgia is false, and its flip side is bitterness.

LOSS

Nostalgia incredible.

That was a magic year.

Literally.

Magic.

Time was suspended. The silver

lining no one remembers,

or maybe the curse,

that now that it’s passed we are still there

still crossing those long spaces, making our small rooms.

In short, it withdrew, in fits and starts,

like the burps of a king reading proclamation.

The year, the magic, the place. Our palace,

torn down, condemned,

foundation filled with brack water

hidden in brush behind the grocery store.

What was it like?

Easier to try and relive last nights dream.

When I see the drunks, the whiz-kids,

the politicians,

When I smell this new concept,

mounted in panic,

of this as the irrational age,

the age where unreason is an invasive bloom,

I know it is nothing but dim scrambling,

backsliding into perversity

the desire to return

to that lost magic,

the age of ease and wonder

that now that it’s gone as if never happened

that now that it’s gone will never return.

The video footage is boggling,

but I don’t like to watch it.

I was there, I don’t need evidence.

Time was a feather,

suspended in a beer bottle.

With a cat in our lap we’d duck through the low door.

Looking back and talking, our head bangs the frame.

Falling to crush the cat

hiss becomes a cheep,

the cat bursts into many mice.

The welt raises into an egg.

We sit on,

nursing,

hidden,

wiping the blood off with spit.
Finally hatches,

the hatch finally opens,

the field buckles and curves,

a giant scarred hand clenches the dirt into a stone.

The dead beckon from the depth of their mist

through the portal.

The little baby hatchlings are so cute!

Fuzzy, running in circles.

Now we’re a family.

Everything was that way then,

totally wild,

when we had our magic.

Not fun all the time, not by any measure.

But in retrospect

more fun on a bad day then the best possible day now.

We sit dull, nothing to do, nothing happens,

throw a spoon in the air and it just falls on the table.

The machines do all the work, and the chemicals,

they are so eager, constructing developments

and strip malls on the head of a pin,

robotic gyrations in a simulation titty bar.

The first night of the month we relieve ourselves

of our gov’t dole.

Packing the house.

Sticking to plastic.

It is always hot, everyone is stupid.

I retreat from my world,

the possibility of the future presents me with nothing but ennui.

My voice gives out around noon,

I know I have cancer.

I know that I’m bitter

the taste of the magic continues to linger.

How can I love this world when I know I have left my palace.

My palace of magic, my deeds and my people?

Cereal Poem

Werewolf PA, pt. 3

We leave the world of ghosts and head for the world of water mollusks, from under the water we see dim shades, the vague forms of a prehistoric extended family...in encapsulated fashion their story goes like this: they die in an apocalypse, all of them...don't worry though, this is but a taste, we shall see more of both them and the crayfish later...

There are little pools, Michael is laying in, empty

a bucket of crayfish

legs articulate on his chest in scuttle

The alpha sheared off his nipple

They recapture the crayfish, sitting them in the pink basin which is so smooth the crayfish explore the walls with their claws raising them as high as possible they are tagged and released all up and down the crick and they return to the shallow pool

The shallowness Allows for The water to warm & The current don’t wash the food away

A ruckus: the dog, Proteus jumps in the crick and eats one of the fish.

Proteus is led to the woods and shot by the man whose fish it was.

Before this, as many fish as were in the school there are people

the fishless man has to eat Proteus or he is not allowed to join the dancing.

He is made to sit far back from the fire. people call him Proteus from then on.

His digestion makes the first dung

The others don’t make dung. They have no butts.

What do the people do at night? they dance

the energy gives out it

is dark jumping

all around there is no fire

the dark is jumping all around it

crawls there

is no fire or people

where are the crayfish the trap was broke

they buried

into the bank deep

into the mud

they found cicadas and bred with them and died

and the hatchlings slept

through a surface apocalypse

digging up through the old passages

bumping their heads on thick gelatinous plastic

some of the pools are too thick

for the cricadas to burrow through and they die some of them

mate in hope that the next batch will be close enough to the level.

These held their despair, did the only thing

Resolute loving, really groovy, and they know it

sliding their antennae over their wings

making new tones that buzzed the irregular edges of

the plastic they had chewed

was toxic enough

to give them a buzz

to make drunk their decades dreams

Poem Cereal

Without further fan-fare, here is the gripping, nonsensical conclusion to your serial poem,

We Rewolf, PA, pt 2

I confess

My baby is a toad’s butt,
A toad’s butt is a green cigarette, mariuanna, virgin mary, Christ is coming, there are many devils,

Rush Limbaugh.

(Toad’s butt; a slang way to name ‘Rush Limbaugh.)

So, if the social transfigured be heaven, and we can choose anything,

choose not to choose, never consciously choose but still happened.

Or as if never happened? wtf does that mean?

In the strict sense of a simile,

is history like memory?

Both have forgotten

aspects,

geo-politico

malice

malice appears,

a nightmare character

the form which upon seeing frightens

thrills up the neck hair,

I saw him.

Once he was a he,

he became me,

walking behind me on the path,

watching, maybe in the woods now.

Maybe has multiplied?

Maybe its not a dopple, maybe ‘it’ is only wearing my clothes,

a psycho-logical tactic!

Maybe I see myself socially as scary, wearing this big black hoody

and custom wing tips slipped over my little goat’s feet.

My fear, which is another man inside myself, has slipped out.

Trying it on, the world that is. He is a medusa tome

I petreify wood. Now I am turning it all into stone,

I ran home to seek help from my wife…

(Our ‘hero’ is mistaken, in his mounting panic, he assumes the figment is a he, but we will never know, maybe the beast were rilly a female, if it even had a sex. Maybe it was a non-sexual being. If it were real, that is to say.)

poem cereal

Butchered Switch is proud to announce the beginning of a new feature here at the blog, serial poems. We found some of the material we’ve been receiving to long to be endured in one sitting, yet so good that not one bit is worth chucking. Thus, our hands tied, we kick off our new series by introducing this snazzy, daft, little two-parter, entitled

w H E R E W O L F Pennsylvania

A free-wheeling exploration of consciousness, through consciousness bending poetic strategies of voice and utter context shift. In other words, it’s a bunch of hazy, crazy mumbo-gumbo buried at the heart of which is an empathetic (hopefully) confessional poem dealing with what I’ve been doing the last few days and this crazy movie I saw that you really should see.

We begin with a rapid introduction, moving from strangers to a deep mental intimacy. Then we go hallucinate a radical therapy commune at my house. The compounded Narrator begins trying to sell you something.

That’s that, commence the poem:

werewolf P E N N S Y L V A N I A

Take a belt of whisky.

No sentimental,

say, these days will not come back

no matter how much sushi

writing is

never strong

er, then: this way.

I pull my eyes out, one at a time, the left then the right

their strings dangle and sway, (it is November, I am single, in

cabs. I have a backstory.

But I’m not coming to you like that, I’m coming to you as a performer.

I want you to be entertained and amazed at my eyes.

Each goose gobbles one. Begin fighting.

Jules is bigger, but sassafras younger.

They scream. The chickens scream.

All the birds are screaming

as we eat our icecreams.

( -Dec. 23^rd, two years earlier)

Denny stands up, watch, runs through the fowl's midst,

scattering them, he caws

and gambols, fluffin his wings

He is going to go into a trance.

He falls into the air,

he hadn’t been there before because we weren’t

imaging him that way,

brrreath clouds, cigarettes cloud, Denny Denny, it’s ok

we’re all thinking of you, pushing you,

caring for you, you

Denny’s

eyes roll open, back and forth,

into his mouth,

becoming a baby,

a violent baby eating his own shit.

Cawing and cheeping,

we throwing our shit at him,

The turkeys respond with territorial gobbles.

Mouths full of mud,

The old man with his accordion,

He has become real, playing a ditty.

-This is one of the things we do here on the compound,

Once a week or month.

Are you kidding? We’ve got plenty of money.

We sell hand typed scrolls of primo-poetry, for fourty a pop,

they come as a surprise in a sealed tube.

Purchasers must designate a theme or bits of language, but

I’m getting off topic, you don’t care for money,

I can see that.

But have you ever unleashed the baby you?

-- Don’t knock it til you’ve tried.

* * *

Stay tuned and riveted for the next installment, the thrrrilling conclusion of Werewolf Pa

Zombie Apology

Butchered Switch would like to apologize for a mistake in it's last post. The photograph at the end of the post is of "the Zombies," an underground rock band comprised only of humans.



These are zombies:
Again, we apologize for the mistake.

ZombieS

This short post is meant to highlight two facts about Zombies.

1.) The zombie is a hopelessly confused animal. No longer totally human, no precedent for what it has become. Zombies are new animals. Eating humans and turning humans into zombies, these are its functions. Hunting in packs and extreme aggression are two features, which make this quite an efficient new species.

Since we don’t know much about them, it being incredibly difficult to collect field data, we must assume that zombies do not procreate. The only way new zombies are created is through the bite. For zombies, the bite is equivalent to coitus. It fertilizes the zombie seed through the blood of the bitten victim.

Not all victims of zombie attack become zombies, some of them are completely eaten and just die. Only those victim’s who somehow manage to repel a zombie attack, yet are still bitten, become zombies. Quite simply, natural selection works so that only strong specimens are added to the insane mass of the zombie mob.

The zombie combines enemy destruction, feeding and procreation in its bite. These combination's are at the root of the zombies disorienting, meta-physical and spiritual confusion, which is why they are so prone to run and scavenge aimless and wild. When a zombie sees a human it runs toward it. We may presume that until it gets there, it does not know which of its urges to satisfy.

2.) Zombies do not eat other zombies. Have you ever seen a zombie eat another zombie? No. They only eat humans. A zombie isn’t a cannibal. A human would probably consider it to be one, but zombies don’t think of themselves that way.

-Zombies