Poems About Charles Bronson and Clint Eastwood By Kyle Hemmings

Here at Zombie Logic Review we're not snobby about poetry, or uptight about classifications. If we like it, we'll publish it. Outlaw, Outsider, dada, and surrealism are merely styles I like and identify with, but my experience as a young poet was with the the tail end of the Small Press revolution of da levy and Marvin Malone and others. I just like poetry. Here are some poems I like that aren't going to fit neatly into anyone's clearly defined category. Can't go wrong with Bronson and Eastwood.


Nothing

All day, Skiff & I are heavy with Nothing.

This Big Nothing mashes us down into hot pavement,
flattens our abs untouched by Insanity workouts.
Our mothers are hung up on too many pills to keep track
where we vanished. 

We're sitting in front of a grocery store on East 4th. Below us,
I imagine rats, king-size rats with the big empty eyes of garbage whores.
They're hungry. They want to eat us.

They can gnaw through neglected bone.

Can't you hear them? I say to Skiff.

Hear what?

Rat-a-tat-tat, rat-a-tat-tat, sing the rats, rat-a-tat-tat, my belly's an empty tomb.

You are bombed on Nothing, declares Skiff in his ratty T-shirt.

We make the girl we named Sally Simple steal us some ice cream,
peach or butterscotch wish. She has half a lobe, half a life, one eye to the sun.
 What didn't melt inside her is now half-empty.

By the time, she gets back, the ice cream has melted.
We throw her a dime.
We throw her a cheap kiss.
We give her the useless tail of our love.

The wish is still good.

But the Nothing is breaking our backs. Waiting on time,
our asses are sore.  I count the feathers & blisters
in last night's dream in which Sally was restored
 to the original.
A girl on Full.

She'd be too good for us. Even though her bare legs
would still carry mysterious scratches,
bumps from unforeseen things in the night. 

Something is pissing me off.

I begin to pound my fists into the hard cracked sidewalk. 

It will not open up & regurgitate my name.

I'm signing the pavement in a script of perfect blood,
sexy loops with Nothing inside.

Skiff asks why? Why this?

Why not this, I say. 

Because it's something, I say. & something is better than nothing. 

Rat-a-tat-tat, sing the rats festooning beneath our stuck lives. 

I'm hungry, says Skiff, what Sally just fed us was Not Enough.
I could eat a shin bone, a heart shrunken to a shrimp, the fat trimmed off daylight.

Rat-a-tat-tat.

You garbage whore.



The Wife Disposal System
for years i've been trying to get rid of the woman who wouldn't love me. i left my wooden leg in the shower, sang miley cyrus out of key, hired a hacker to sabotage her dot coms. i dropped scattered notes along the floor, fragmented diagrams of her talking dreams, plastic daffodils, her menage a trois with thick-lipped voyeurs. the only reason she won't quit me, she says, puncturing an aluminum can of processed fruit, is because i remind her of the empty eyes of her first dog, a white & brown Beagle that followed her everywhere when she was a child. before she set him loose into the street.


Charles Bronson 

What's worse than putting your skinny nose in a nut cracker? It's being taken hostage by Charles Bronson in his leaning house on a mountain. I think Charley has gone nuts. He keeps pacing in front of me with hands behind his back and saying something about the weight of happiness is too much for all of us to bear. Charley, I yell, what the fuck! Please untie me, I'm getting nervous. He says for me to give him the code, first. I say WHAT CODE, CHARLEY? YOU MEAN THE CODE TO MY MOTHER'S COOKIE JAR, THE ONE SHE ALWAYS KEEPS SECURED WITH TWO COMBINATION LOCKS? OR DO YOU MEAN THE CODE LIKE THE ONE THAT PRESSES MY FUZZY GIRLFRIEND'S HORNY BUTTON AND SHE CAN GO THROUGH THREE MEN LIKE A BOWL OF CHICKEN SOUP? I mean THE CODE, says Charley. Like CODE AS IN THIS CEILING WILL BEGIN TO LOWER IN TEN SECONDS AND FLATTEN YOU. I dont' know any code, Charley, except in node abode dote my fish took off with my boat. Charley turns to me and winks. He says Nice try, kid, but you're missing a vowel. He walks away. Just like that. I was only short a vowel. 

Clint Eastwood

 I had him laughing so hard that he promised to lick my mahogany legs clean if I told him another joke about a Democratic mayor who lost his head and hallucinated talking chairs. Truth is I can't talk at all. I'm just an empty chair. It's Clint who puts words on my seat. Sometimes Clint thinks I'm an angry chair. Like the time he kept asking me why he didn't get the lead role in Total Recall. Then he says, DON'T TELL ME YOU DON'T REMEMBER. No, he said, looking down at me, that's my line. 

Footfalls

You've suffered from insomnia since you learned that you could never truly close your eyes. Dizzy from un-sleep, you cover 3/4th of your red eye self with wallpaper. You wish you could dream of electric frogs jumping across the canals of your brain. The cell phone's chirp becomes a siren. A woman, whose voice you don't recognize, says We never met but. . . Remember the Local 251 bust, whistleblower? She's been living on food stamps since her old man got stuffed in a can. She says someone is watching you. She says Sleep with one eye open, Mr. Whistleblower. The face in the mirror is only 2/3rds yours. Your hands have no connection to your core. Shadows move within shadows. Distant barking of a dog. Fall. Be still. Don't put up a fight. In the veins of the night. Glass doll sigh. Shut eye. 

Reports are that Kyle Hemmings has published elsewhere and likes dogs. Me, too. Check out his blog DogPunk & Psychedelic Stinky Cat