KJ

KJ lives in Orange County California with his dog, Mr. Bear. Some of his publication credits include: Decomp Magazine, Yellow Mama, Gutter Eloquence, Troubadour 21, why vandalism?, and The Flea. He works easy at his love’s labor.

KJ's Blog: illegalfunk.blogspot.com

 

To Ravage

Nature laughs through her scarlet, scabrous gash. 
Warped teeth sag from her smile like dead rose 
petals dangling from the desiccated receptacle. 
 
Lodestars lodged in the bizarre blues of her eyes 
show me where to lie down at her feet in the tall 
grass. At dawn, she cracks that lariat swimmingly, 
until I rollover to expose my nearly tanned hide. 
 
We fight constantly. My every modern thought is 
a promise of landscape rape. The gentle finesse she 
puts into pressing her full breasts against my serge 
lapel makes me pour out my drunken heart like a 
pig tipping over a slop bucketful of gnarly, peach pits. 
 
My tongue clatters haplessly to the floor as I try to 
take a stab at the matter. Her irritating jab poisons 
my nerve endings: "None of your beeswax, honey." 
 
If I pursue, she'll arrange my face with vase after 
vase, and if I'm unlucky, a high heeled shoe or two. 
I thought the endless, petty quarrels would continue, 
then she said: "I won't talk. That opinion dies with you." 
 
Sometimes I still push my feeble, mankind-oriented border in 
hope that I'll gall her enough to smash me with womanly wiles, 
and mourn the deteriorating shards of me in no particular order.

 

 

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Snow Job

Boy who sprints at a snowman iced over by his brother, 
you are beyond the pail your brother clutches as the wad 
of a grin fractures in angelic whites and yellows across his 
snickering maw so warm from the soup mother hath wrought. 
 
The red, gushing joy thrumming in your woven veins keeps you 
humming full bore like a juvenile juggernaut with a shiny morning 
star whirligig swirling in lambent rings above your tender skull. 
Lumps of the snowman's distending blank, gray body wait, cold. 
 
Your scarf wags a happy, viridian hue against Sunday's clean, blue sky. 
In childish pride, you drop your blunt head and guide it with the stolen 
gold you hide in your eyes from a bereft sun that lies in the firmament 
radiating argent light like a quarter wished to the tiled floor of a fountain. 
 
Flesh mashes frigid, packed snow. A wail wells up in the burgeoning fright in 
your lips until you let loose like an old mule kicking off a once nascent burden. 
Tear ducts burst on you like two neatly packed snowballs popping on concrete. 
Mother comes running as a dish cracks in the sink. Your brother embarks on 
a fool's errand to bring up the rear in his daffy flying ace hat and dark goggles, 
but Mother pinches up his ear again. She will not have soup enough for you...

 

 

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Visiting Hour Foofaraw

I.

Blood lurks in lingering, billowy gouts that haunt the yellow

darkness of their eyes with vermilion. Today their loved ones

arrive for the collective exorcism. Their pants and skirts wrap

sweet odors of urinal cakes, news folderol, and baseball games.

How long has their frightened gaze been frozen solid in place?

Car doors open. Young girls and boys’ eyes go fanatical with plans

to hustle orderlies out of peppermint candies with slow hosannas from

their palm frond eyelashes. Their parents follow; bop fingertips against

palm pre screens they bought recently between catching snatches of porn.

Prison doors open. Smells wind ghostlike, towards the bedlamites’ noses.

An inaudible grinding births snowflake shaped cracks in their teeth. When

gifts come up, inmates yell: I know! Misunderstanding, all guests sigh: Oh.

 

II.
Son faces father in a chair trying to decipher the reason behind the wiry

shape of Dad’s Top Ramen hair that flakes apart under the AC’s cool air.

Dad protects himself from the boy’s best red sweater by baking a dream

of himself as an immaculate sun that his boy sprints to full flail until the

boy’s soft body is reincarnated as a hiss of curling yarn enshrouding one

pile of steaming meat that can only lie there in a smolder of pulchritude.
Dad says nothing when the boy talks because the boy is Orange Sunshine.
Mom is just a white noise begging the boy to step from Dad's eyes, burning.

III.

A girl nestled behind Dad’s firm knees holds a séance to Mom’s ghost face.

Mom left long ago on an erotic dalliance with another woman. A woman

with limitless greens in her irises where Mom could finally let herself go.

The fantasy loops: She lies with the woman in a fallow cornfield. Their

tongues fight through white teeth to entangle each other like two red beetles

grappling through eternal acres of mud slushes on an utterly filthy odyssey.

The girl would’ve broken the curse with her mother’s name on her lips. Before

she could’ve, mom’s chin wiggled into a flattering, white gown of spittle to worship

this time when she and her concupiscent hallucination came together on farmland.

Her daughter is lost among a row of corn; Her husband lost in a row of moaning.

They will not observe the tradition of looking into themselves and holding hands.

 

IV.

One lone schizophrenic surveys the paper bag on the table

in front of his hushed elder sister who brought him the bag

despite the ward’s strict orders to have lunch before coming.

The schizo spills his personality into each ridge, crenellation,

and fold on the bag. Eventually he realizes that he is the bag.

Every fold represents a new side of himself; his sister being

just another that he uses to comfort himself when he cannot

fabricate ways of making attentive friends by folding himself.

 

V.

A voice comes on the intercom. Blood rushes to the fore of the

whites in the inmates' eyes. Their dizzy hysteria embodies itself

in the fevered tempo of their hopping heartbeats. News comes:

For reasons we cannot disclose, tomorrow’s visiting hours must

be cancelled. White is the stark color that left their startled eyes

weak with the joy of knowing the outside world will stay there.

 

 

 

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Double Take

The moon leers with

a crozzled shard of a

doll's eye in a mangle

of a yellowing socket

on the flat, black back

of a cookie-gravel road;

or perhaps my blind-faith

in visine is starting to make

non-believers of the irises

I can't appreciate right now.

"What are you looking at?"

 

 

 

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Blind Individualism is Too Big to Fail.

I hear the pretty, four dollar words you blag

me with like some sad contingency fee attorney

with a heart as pure as a bag of barn owl manure.

Ansel Adams couldn't make better depictions, but

tell me which bloody-edge, human-plight issue I

am seeing disemboweled in this impeccable flier?

 

Is it about the way an aborted fetus resembles real grape jelly dollops?

Is it about the Palestinians pouring more Jewish blood out than bad Kool Aid?

Is it about the warring Israelites: spilling Palestinian blood since 1948?

Is it about how a cow skull looks when a nail drills through it in gory, tarantella form?

Is it about how when I die I will get a free hand job from Che Guevara in paradise?

Is it about how an omniscient God will bake my corpse with hellfire for non-belief?

Is it about how a sedan seat is fitted to a Mexican or a Mexican to a sedan seat?

Is it about how the Great Ayatollah thinks Satan has his dick in the U.S. soil?

Is it about how the phrase "legalize it" can be written in so many wonderful fonts?

 

Tell you what, if I feel like your little sheet here inhibits my ability to have a

relatively informed thought in this young, fledgling, United States democracy,

then I say:

 

Fuck your country with no informed citizenry.

Fuck your life with no kindness.

Fuck your liberty with no equality.

& Fuck your pursuit of happiness with no logistics.

 

Should you, or the state, or nation

decide to get a seasoned shyster

to sue me for slander, or libel,

or any other tripe your oat-greedy

pony can glean off of its back hoof,

then I will be forced to hire counsel,

and when her reply to my question about

time, billable hours, costs for service,

sundry form letters, interrogatories,

depositions, witnesses, discovery, trial,

or possibly an out-of-court settlement

reaffirms my utterly grim expectations,

I will sigh and say: Okay. I don't have

much time or money. Can you tell me how

much to hold the gavel & condemn myself

to the fullest extent the law will allow?

Because I think ol' Uncle Sam shall pay for

the appellate fees once he sees I am one

patriotic individual who is too big to fail.

 

The only question I want to ask is:

"Are you a citizen who files taxes?"

Because this one might come at your

expense, asshole. I plead guilty to all.