Another Entry Oddball’s Theme for the week. We are counting this as a love poem (even though one or two editors if the kind of hook-up suggested in the title is going to end well), making it 3-1 in our fun Love vs. Hate competition.

 

Existentially bipolar white male seeks a Nancy to his Syd: a personals ad

In a short bus crossing the street

I saw

A lone retard in the morning light

Illuminated angelic in a wheelchair, lolling

Drooly, for a second he had the heat that I lack

Flopping fishy in a near strait-jacket

My heart will give out

A free balloon to its hundredth customer ding ding ding confetti filled cardiac arrest

It swells as I observe a muslim girl in a hijab

Carrying a 32 ounce plastic cup full of doctor pepper

Cynical Sagittarius rarely realize from their flying carpet vantage points

That handguns crow with cocks come morning

And when (not if) (not eventually) (not soon) just when

You lose the barefoot snoreless aerosol shazam clench

The head won’t float singing down the river

Despite silence two microscopes can stare at eachother all day

And never discern which one is upside-down

The clowns might wave their wands

But it won’t move my rowboat from where it’s mired in the mud

The only way to do that

Is to lie back under the haw of gulls, the yawn of waves

And wait for the tide to let me sleep in a new place, a fresh space

Unaware of the miney-meany western loon feather, embedded

I can’t betray the freckle constellation

Cram the gold moment past your lips (or was it hips?)

Salivate later, there are looms of destruction to sew with

Spiral stink of soured milk in a wastebasket

Slaughter the sows to finish teaching them a lesson

I can only hope it’s my ego on the fork’s end

Though it won’t dissuade me from my lobotomous duties

Just watch me LA LA LA LAAA OPEN WIDE

Sea turtles have the manners to brush their teeth

Before going to the net swish three points

Incriminate the echo of failure eliminate

The limits of lab-rats bratty weaving in and out of traffic

Spacemen don’t need to jump they just float

Pivot the mustache of a used car salesman

Twirling his hands he says “I’m sorry but I can’t sell you a 99 kryptonite dicksucker for less than 5 goats

I’ve got Beelzebub poseur bureaucrats to please !”

“I suppose I can just run the housewife manifesto into the dirt but I’ll pout while I do it”

The census worker’s cyborg face lights up elitist backing out the door

“Get back on that couch! I’m not finished psychoanalyzing you yet!”

This can be either a heatstroke or an enlightenment

Crank my gargle to the Parthenon

We all know the ugly secret but can’t quite release the leash

Giggling at sneakers hanging from powerlines, pouring water on my smoking hand

Eavesdropper you can guess which one I’ll claim it is

(You can guess can’t you?)

Lessee here, ah ha page 2 hundred 25 of the pop-culturomicon

Doctor doctor gimme the news

I gotta bad case of sniffin glue

My radio wishes it were a television and my television failed out of hypnotist school

Sometimes I wish I were a machine but I lack the clean hum

George Washington had no halo despite what sycophants sputter

Clench, the courage won’t hurry

Hurricane season this year is gonna be a whopper with cheese

The hole in the ocean won’t quit sobbing (let the lights grow dim, I’ve been ready)

And all the antidepressants on earth won’t stop it from spitting all our precious fuel back at us

Come to think of it, drink deep from it

That might make me feel better, where’s a match?

Last time I reached for moonlight, went for octopus spite

An eleven thirty pm phone call

May have saved me as much as it nearly ended me (gasp)

I was this close

To saying in that highpitched voice “I love you” (cue the meanspirited laughtrack and applause signs)

But I could only muster deeply “I miss you” (cue ethnic kiss oooooo sound)

And I comprehend (but cannot mend)

Though there are scissors in my hand

DNA is not love

Excalibur is the loneliest gun in the west

All its showdown audience grown up, gone to dust and pus

If you haven’t dreamed oblivion

Then you have no way of sniffing out its odor, filling the order

“Just fill out the paperwork and get out of my office please”

Sex: nonthreatening and invisible

Race: last place and panting

Address: your closet

Occupation: ogler

I don’t want to die by car accident and bowel movement

If I had a choice, and I think I do

I’d tell all the monks without organ grinders

About the health risks associated with vows of silent celibacy

Before they explode, ignite evil gleefully

Take a bottle of pills and if you can still call me in the morning take another

I swear I saw a smiling face saying, “hello hooray”

In a hamburger at a fast food joint

And everyone else in the air conditioned trough

Probably had similar sinister steaming revelations

My hand wrapped in ice, liquid all over the cement

I chowed down hoping to stop with squealing bone smoke breakage

The knucklepain hallelujah

And in that second of near completion

All the groomed heads heard a manikin manatee Ed-McMannish boy voice intone

“Gentlemen start your blenders!”

But it was less interesting, less rapturous than the numb meat in their hands

Chewing juicy juicy to the optional tendon

Was the only way to slow the dullsword ashwindy ache of missed pinched hit nerve opportunities

 

Photography © Allison Goldin

Photography © Allison Goldin

 

Nate Maxson is a 24 year old poet and performance artist from Albuquerque, New Mexico. He has published 2 books; Vaudeville Jihad in 2011 and I Wished for a Serpent in 2012.

Allison Goldin is an artist living in Cambridge. Her work is a collection of spontaneous drawings from the imagination. The most common link throughout her art are the semi-recognizable creatures scattered amongst and bringing together the surrounding doodles. She is currently studying Illustration at The School of Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.