Calentures

Poem For A Burner On High

Bent,
Over the deadened red signet
Of a stove's heated coils
Lighting a menthol Signal

The heat on my nose
The welt on my chin
The Hotpoint, the introductory rate
The muffler, the steak ranch
The mailman's wake
The air so grassy and thick as sour cream
The flannel, the Cutlass's Turtle Wax gleam

Jealous of the healthy girls in shorts smuggling
Mister Boston in Snapple bottles
To paneled basements
What boys admit to them
The length of summer break
I can't tell you how much of their gum I've stepped in
Hoofing it to work...

What's left of varnish
What shone in 1961
The beef hash, the boasts, the gun rack, the Cope
The traffic rumbling over the slope

I just sell unbreakable combs
I could never give all these dogs good homes

Forfeits

Joyeux Bastille Day

Get together a few hundred of your best friends, surge into an undefended outer courtyard, and kick a pastry cook in your groin.

Or, sit out in the sun and watch a few Guided By Voices videos.

Bulldog Skin

Teenage FBI (live)

The Official Ironmen Rally Song

Cachexia

Confirmation Bias

Shin splints and a burning stye
The sky was doused with purple dye
The Sting cassette I gave her mom
All smeared with mentholated balm
Cooking sugar for divinity
She doubted my virginity

Behind Food Lion on Pentecost
Those tongues of flame were just exhaust

The Petroleum By-Products - "Rat Face"

Friends and family

March 1988




















December 1988



















December 1988

Malone: 4 Haiku

(i)
New Lamps - Tan Here Now
You see two basketball hoops
Next to a small dam.

(ii)
A pancake supper
Held in the Adult Center
At 4 PM sharp.

(iii)
Self serve honey stand,
Bonesteel's Gardening Center,
Firewood, gas meter.

(iv)
Yankee One Dollar
Soup and stamps, carpeted ramps
And dryer lint sky.

Pairings

Bad Scans (II)

Bad Scans (I)

Dinner party for Ghostface Killah, Mary Rowlandson

Appetizers
Boston Baked Beans
One handful of ground nuts
Jellies
Tartar sauce

First Course
Samp with broth
Ziti
Half of a horse liver

Second Course
Kansas Fried Chicken
A piece of a fawn
Blood of the deer in the paunch

Sorbet
Strawberry kiwi

Entree
Big round onions on a t-bone steak

Dessert
A mess of wheat
Chick-O-Sticks
Buttercrunch joints or something

Some doggerel

I don't know how to heal a sprain anymore
I never feel like tasting rain anymore
Every day is not Samhain anymore
I'm so sorry I lent her my brain anymore

...

I wrote a toast
For the wedding of the Holy Ghost
Brother in law
To the heavenly host

...

Eunice went for a mammogram
The nurses laughed at her tattoo of Yosemite Sam
She held it together in their mobile lab
But wept at lunch over Rangoon crab