Glukupikron

Slice onions with your shoulder blades
Pummel you blue
Made promises amid fits of laughter

You knew not to believe them

Didn't you?

¼ Haiku, ¾ Whimsy

There's something about
Cacti and fresh paints that gets
Me hot and bothered

Photograph not my intellectual property

courtesy of "Native Body Art" by Fiorella Podesta

1973

I may turn this into a longer short story, flash fiction OR I may just let it stay a short-short. We will see. Regardless, please fling your criticism forth.


Growing up, my mother always worried about me. She would say things like, "Honey, you don't have to take the stairs. There is an elevator, and the chances of a fire occurring are far slimmer than the chances of you falling down those stairs and breaking all of your frail, little bones..." Her voice dripped with saccharine concern. I could tell that she prized me, and not in the typical motherly way, but in the same way that she prized the dozens of collectible figurines she kept in the glass case in the living room. One night, when I was fourteen, I crept out my bedroom window to catch a 10 p.m. showing of American Graffiti with my best friend. I could tell you that we were wholesome, angelic teenagers but then I would be lying. Innocence is mental and behavioral, and while my behavior was charmingly meek, my thoughts were crazed and wildly rebellious. Daydreams of mine consisted of intermittent bank robberies and hordes of hormone-crazed teenagers painting each other's bodies in layers upon layers of pheromones . . . real kinky Bonnie & Clyde shit. While watching American Graffiti, a sudden electrifying urge burst forth within me involving Richard Dreyfuss and copious amounts of leather. And I never was the same.

Prosetry I

That was the night in which I traversed several roads to get to one, the only one that welcomes me in the same, uniform way every time I cast my eyes upon that weathered, dual-decked vessel. After further mummifying my wrist, I scurried inside and could smell the holy dilapidation of something so loved that it’s destroyed. Even the surrounding sidewalks remain enamored with dirt and mud and muck.
Do not bother wiping the ugly remnants off your shoes
allow them to be danced
shaken
jumped off

"Who sings this?"

What happens when a bigot

falls in love
with the fervent cream of
a black woman's singing voice?

It snows in Miami.

Suburban Swampcity Blues

This is a fragment from a short story I'm currently working on. Constructive criticism is welcomed, as always.


When Santiago removed the knit skullcap from his head, he felt a blanket of goose bumps rapidly form all along the nape of his neck, as if Aphrodite herself had been the one making love to him all night. The sensations his mind had identified were nothing but vertiginous pleasure spasms; he could not make sense of any of it. Rationality was a tiny vessel of mute seamen, and it was long gone by now. He tried to compose more thoughts, but this only made him dizzier.
He laid down on his bed and began tossing a hackie-sack up toward the ceiling and with his thumb and index finger, catching it each time with ease, as if it were the stem of a feather floating back to him. His hands appeared to be rough and aged, unlike the rest of his body: an immaculate machine throbbing with a youthful urgency. Then again, this was commonplace at the studio. It was filled with the buzzing of the young, and each palm was scarred and calloused. The people he shared his space with during the day were there for the same exact reasons. They, too, were thirsty for malleability, for creation. And they loved to sculpt, just as he did.

Five Dense Minutes

2:58 am: My feet are almost as calloused as your hands always were. These hands are virginal apparati with a texture similar to that of honey or warmed dough. Virtually unscathed. Clearly, they do not make nearly enough.

3:02 am: My head is buried in my pillow now and I'm thinking this can't be healthy- being reminded of your life by the faintest sound of music that you will never have the opportunity to hear. I'm wondering if I'm sick for never wanting to forget; for fearing Alzheimer's at age seventy more than death at age thirty; for wishing for any physiological malfunction over amnesia. I'd like to always be able to recall the inflection of your voice when you would ask what it was I had learned in school that day. At twelve, it posed as a hideous question. But at twenty, not so much.

"What did you learn in school today?" Now, that's a poem.

Well I guess it's more of a Science anyway

"I want you to gallop past my periphery.
Prance across my panoramic scope,
so I can practice the art of
refusal, as I clench my teeth
to turn you away
over and over again," he insisted.

"I'm hoping it will get easier
after the six-hundredth trial..."

"You should be kissed. And often. And by someone who knows how."

you could say what she had experienced
was a bout of magic;
a strange ephemeral burst of wicked
confidence that could seemingly give one the ability
to blow dozens of shiny, prismatic bubbles without a wand,
to make billows of smoke dance when the incense
burns too quickly,

but there wasn't anything magical about it.
it was the stroke of a guru,
a transient cluster of divinity's guise:

a lie,
cloaked.

He was a Sailor

Look onward, psychonauts!
Scrape the paint off the gilded cage,
as you murmur your melodramas through
the straws in your mouths
and then softly ask,
"Where is my ego today?"

"Dead!
Dead!
Dead!
Dead!"