FANZINE

BLOODTHIRST

I get caught eating out grannies on a Routemaster bus.
The soundtrack is talk radio on mute.

I travel forward in time.
I cannot transmit messages via my broken leg.
I cannot resurrect the dead from the comfort of my room.

I become homeless at the exact moment I’m buried alive.
The girl in my sex tape speaks in full sentences.
She’s clever like that, and missing from the neck up.
My supplier supplies the sarin she needs to get off.

If all this is a coincidence, then the Führer’s still alive
and living inside a yak. And he tastes of children.
And he tastes of Blondi’s gold teeth. And cyanide.

At the bottom of my soul,
or the congealing of so many globs of old soap in a bath,
there’s you pinched into Jesus and bloodthirsty
for holding and the sweetness of this world.

THE EVIL DEAD

I am attempting to watch The Evil Dead and to not cry at the sad bits.
And then there are the many ancestral conurbations made just last week
into which I won’t be able to go without crying, maybe, by definition.

I see the girl in the shop on the corner has a forehead larger than her face,
and know nothing horrible will ever happen to her that hasn’t happened already.
She’s pretty enough to keep dying of old age until the neighbours smell her.

I’m not sure if the man-eating man knows where his next meal is coming from,
or that the traffic he’s in is the book he takes to bed and reads from in his sleep.
I’m not sure about demons possessing trees, but I know the voices I hear are gone.

———–

_{Gary J. Shipley’s Gumma Homo is now available for preorder from Blue Square Press.}