who in the hell is this phuck driving 90? i wave at the guy, FASTER!
FASTER! i scream. our turn-signal clicks as we wait at an intersection
at peach street. i moo there under blue sky.

 
website- 1
website- 2
TOP

small cracker
box room
neon flooding through
thin curtains
outside the night
lies like
black blood
over the din of
highway noise
the rushing
mass of heathens
headed down
to eternity

nothing here but
a pretty head full
of empty thoughts
an unwise decision
to let the
big dog roll
minus one
the sea bag
gone on somewhere
down the line
bouncing on
bad macadam
toward the
big muddy crossing
Memphis hanging
on the bluff
like an
old warrior
shining with
magic fire

wonder what I'm
doing here
discharge
in my pocket
separation pay
a side trip
to Juarez behind me
coming to
in Van Horn
loaded aboard the
bus like
a side of beef
after falling
over an ashtray
in the El Paso
bus station
out cold

Hung up by
a pretty face in
a roadside diner
an invitation
a girl too sweet
to pass up
a fifth of
I. W. Harper
& good intentions

remembering the break
of waves
on warm beaches
the florescent swish
of a bow
cutting water
a steel-clad
Magellan
finding new worlds
to fuck over

ahead the green
land of home
forests
thicker than
the focal length
of eyes
nights like fever
bottled
in bond

lost in Ranger in
that moment
never to be
found again
my picture on
a milk carton
not yet
made

website
TOP

I pilot my blimp
my big black
blimp down
the river corridor
down the shipping lanes
where weather is
predictable
and navigation
is a breeze

it is night and I pass
blimp hotels and bars
clifftop moorings and
treetop apartments
with dim red
porchlights

and I pull into
the Judy Bar
which offers free parking
for blimp jockeys
and my heels spark
on the metal gratings
as I pass through those
swinging doors

everyone working in Judy's
looks about the same
female and male
waitrons dressed alike
it's a clone bar
and one with copper
hair and that
intractable headache manner
takes my order

white spider with a twist
and as she turns
to go a motion
in black denim
I think of you
walking away from me
and then it all
starts to make
sense

website
TOP

Lunar reflections on
my moontan flesh I
feel salt air cling
with hands as hungry
as his Waves crash
We crash against the
wooden retainer This
is 17 years and away
from home This is what
we give and take
My hair now clings
to my face
like salt air
like his hands
like never and ever
all in one
flowed like estrogen

 
website
TOP

THE WOMAN WHO LOVED MAPS

doesn't want Triple A.
Doesn't want Michner's
but an old map, a little
warped like the people
she attracts: men with
something missing, a
leg, an ear, an eye,
a heart. She wants a
map full of what does
not go together like Arctic
flowers blooming in a
tropical sea or ex-alkies
who write her on the
hour, weeping about the
lilies on Diana's coffin.
She buys a feather boa
to strip on public access
tv as she plans her
funeral. The woman who
loves maps wants to be
read like an old map,
carefully by someone
with time to imagine
what isn't clear and then
smooths her creases and
lies her back in a velvet
padded map drawer,
carefully as lifting a child
into lace, not wedged
into a visor or crumpled
into a glove compartment
in rush hour traffic on
a crammed Virginia
highway, slamming to
a curve where a semi
has jack-knifed

 
website
TOP

---

click here

 

website
TOP

---

my feet are cold
my nails are long
there's hair on my
chest, arms, balls
my cock, limp,
hides from the world
as it always
has

I don't know where
my head went
it was stolen
no
ransom note

TOP

An excerpt from madness
I was supposed to just be getting a blowjob but it felt more like a root canal as she sliced her toothpick redneck teeth into me and the judge and the mechanic and the dentists daughter all hovered over me in a shabby and weak and sick-assed attempt to bring forth my demise.

I saw a wolverine
I saw my mother
I saw angel dust
I saw with a black and decker and hopefully right straight thru yer hearts!

Sometimes society worx me over like the mafia going gangbusters.

Jay Miner - chapbooks and audio
TOP

---

to
do
she hears
him say
reaching for that
cigarette
smoke curls
through the window
crack
misty night rain
bends to soothe
his breathing
labors
as if
her long hair
he faithfully craves
to keep brushed aside
held up
entwined in warmed
fingertips
is too much
for him

website
TOP

Once long ago
I remember sitting on a porch
in the deepest
of the South
watching flaming meteors
Dance across the sky.

My Grandmother,
in only that way
that she can,
explained from her
Alabama Baptist Faith
this is God's way
of depositing
"Bright Souls"
in a new life.....

Some thirty years later
I sit on my porch
on a clear Tejas morning
sipping Creole coffee
watching God
make a magnificent deposit
in the Bank of Flaming Souls
and I wonder.....

How long
does my fire
burn?

TOP

Past chemicals
stare through
my eyes.....
in astonishment
that
ripples in
a body
of water
could be
that magnificent.
Will I ever
get over it?.....
or out of it?
That imperfection
in the lake.

TOP

Darkness melts
into the pantries of orchids
rich and full
in scents and stars,
sweet upon the lip,
beneath
the tongue of morning
pressed against my dreaming.

TOP

Can you feel the
network breathing?

Wires frosted with intelligence,
it flicks an indolent eye
now and then through these
cathode-ray connections
like an invisible laser dancing
over a silicon cityscape of
electrically inter-engaged minds.

When it huffs a sigh
a squillion packets squeal,
sent zinging the wrong way
in a silver server shudder.


When it finally speaks
the very cables will tremble.
Light will sear the screens
and the data run amok.

website
TOP

wolf spider retreats
to his hole behind the shutter
as the sun of morning
lights my heavy wing tip
steps across the lazy
southern porch.
night dies slowly
and another chip
at the stone of
eternity is taken
from my life.
another day to watch
the sun rise and fall
across a sky
i don't
dare question.

TOP

Yes, I feel like honey,
sugar and sweet melting
in the pot of July;
Languid, transparent, dewy;
Like sighs of humidity
Dripping through the kitchen window,
under the shadow of 4 o'clock,
into your private space
reflecting the long shadows
onto dusk until I melt
through your fingers
like honey, yes, I feel
like honey.

website
TOP

I could say he clocked out
19 hundred and 99 years ago
filing an everlasting compensation
leaving us union brothers
to pass the hat
and go it alone.

TOP

THOMAS LOWE TAYLOR & LEWIS LACOOK
Lewis LaCook

The room unmoored, glowing focused
Hey now, unskank, latest formalisms delete
Versimilitude, as if smiling she wasted face
Lore of the her, aftermind, latened husks
Sulking cross-eyed in the breach, amorous
locus(t)

You'd inTend'd no mere scabrous fento;
Though your engagement was vindicated in
denial;
                 finial spoon, la, nast your plento
interminate
        as if a fiscal syphilis were normal to
furthered
Yorf! Notto, last mentionase, yr formal flattened
the door beckoning plaster makeskill, yr fats,
deal
harshly with me please, as if indentation's
dictionary personified within these lamentations
where hard upon your liners, a newer age bespoke
committment, or what's been enacted as misued,
superimposition inquires admittance to damned
planning
phlange, or the corpses, the corpses!

Hearst.   Lord of dominos.   Infatuatee to what's
there
could have likewise incinerated the bugaboo, er,
bungalow,
woolen swells of matrices mothering out of the darker
closets to transcend trajectories, like
"the sky rippled with clouds like the cellulite on a
vegas whore."
the the. big john & sparky, spelled delicious into
morning's
mama on the big fat john with a twanky in her moth
yodda yodda yodda where'd you'd bent the lines
backwards across her innocence, abstracting the gelid
and spooning out shoots of tombs blossomed/withered
Into some such knot of denial that barely makes us
potent,
not Potent Enough to port with her syrups of calling
drenched in seriousness, duh. The dominos
are the Very Orders You Better Get Used To.

punched out monosyllabics within some esoteric
flam, how she'd stilled me outer in the husks of
desire
made simple or plain by the flowing juices in my hands
here's yours, you might say, and fly off the handle
....right here above this....

where she  mistook  you  for an  impulse
pulp of what's slipped viscious in the cinders
as narcotics couldn't veil a treaty from the ranks
of platonic negativity, what they couldn't
fathom was an extra layer of fat to the
sky too negliable to eroticize, juicy hands
that bitten bitter in burgeoning flirts of stirrings
unearthed time and again gaine a mite
of eating, er, breathing, not husks but
living breathing fuck coat of
love that slept-on girl til her
voice is no longer justwokeup, can
practice a little that television
etiquette, high definition must mean
overdetermination to walter benjamin

TOP

---

for almost a full day the wind creaks out a life shaking this house.
Resigned to a night indoors. Old video. The young Orson, Irish and
dashing. His voice a punctuation mark. Something to just flow into.
The black and white stories the tensions. How just because of that
narration, you know to hold a breath or tense a muscle. And so the
phone should ring. But no pause or stop. The tape rolls. An old
friend to talk out love and pain. The way we can rationalize our
happiness away in an effort to control pain. Rita Hayworth smoking a
cigarette near the Baja coast. In our shadow selves we do not
understand sympathy, far too familiar as we are with pity. A party on
the beach for sharks. It comes down to trust. Young Orson walks away
in disgust. If we cannot walk into love with our eyes open then we
should not dream of it with our eyes shut. And why shouldn't he kiss
Rita, she looked at him full of invitation and initiative. And with
that kiss he fell. I try to remember if Welles was married to Hayworth
when this was made or was this the start. Or the finish. We cannot
control anything. The gun will go off in Marin. Odd moments of silence
where no one speaks, but you can hear breathing on the phone. The
police wheel out the body in San Francisco. I look at the landmarks of
that old film noir city, a city where I have spent so much time of
recent months, but it is not that city. Rita will speak Chinese into
the phone. The defenses will fall apart. Dashing Orson has continued
to trust. Does he love her? Even in the mad house. The shattering
mirrors. When does he ask her to marry? Orson sighs the last part of
the story. By a bay of black water. Wind pounding this box. Credits.
Thank you for hearing me. Will call again soon. Click.

website
TOP

Postcard From a Quiet Place
(Copyright 1999 Marc Ellis)

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

FROM:   A Reverie In a Small Apartment
               Somewhere in New Orleans

           To:     A Lovely Girl who Perished in an Aeroplane
                      c/o The Vast Sky

_______________________________________

Butterflies,
masquerading as stones,
as sea-shells,
in a quiet place,
where threads of tears,
over time, unravel;

     She wept such lovely butterflies,
     that floated on white Asian forests,
     and rested their wings briefly
     on the radiators of owls...

 
website
TOP

please submit your poem
by the 25th of every month to: