Michael Dwayne Smith lives near a Mojave Desert ghost town with his family and rescued animals. Work appears/is forthcoming in 150+ publications, including Surreal Poetics, Rat's Ass Review, Skidrow Penthouse, Cortland Review, burntdistrict, Word Riot, Chiron Review, FRiGG, Monkeybicycle, and the defunct but sorely missed >kill author and Gutter Eloquence. He’s been twice nominated for the Pushcart and is a recipient of both the Hinderaker Award for poetry and the Polonsky Prize for fiction.
Ode to Lovers
Drunk? Oh yes
and lugging headstones around.
Another round
for these dead roses
and for the gravely concerned. Ghosts
are wandering away. Their songs,
anyway.
Nobody cares.
The planet is pretty much a ghost story
these days, everyone
waiting for the once-only-mythological
Great Flood.
Oh it’ll be here.
And Oh, the stories you’ll tell,
fresh off of talk cable and bible radio and
the sad excuse for an imagination you
lug around in your skull.
All our skulls, really.
We can’t
imagine how to save ourselves
from ourselves.
We’re that sad.
Not even a pity, Humanity.
We fucked ourselves, and I feel like an
incidental thought
on the edge of a universal consciousness
about to take
a long nap. From here
Jesus looks a lot like Donald J. Drumpf,
heaven just a crotch lick away.
Huckster greatness
because of course it matters.
Hey Boomers,
when the moon-sized fireball knocks
at your door
just pay it off,
as in Hollywood-mafia-movie-style
protection, right?
Right. In your homeless dreams.
I’m watching you not give a flat fuck
about kids.
Because of course
you know your kids are already dead.
(Daddy built a new golf course.)
Because of course
we’re all already dead.
Permission granted: racism, rape culture,
death-wishing-sex-robot-virtual-reality,
with bacon on it.
It’s all good.
I’m lugging headstones.
Of dead people
from all our sweet-yearning pasts.
This epitaph reads
Maul my hair, I dare you, you self-centered,
delicious, copulation-machine of empty
annihilation and cigarettes
snuffed in cheap, stale beer.
A certain future is now, Dear Lovers.
The virgins this fine morning
don’t sing anymore.
A Surrealist Day Planner
My open hand is Sunday. Wednesday is my cat
still figuring out if he can wholly trust me.
Friday’s the year to year slope of my back.
Monday is always the brutality of need.
Tuesday’s blind from staring directly at Sunday.
Turns out Thursday and Saturday are secret
lovers. I promised not to tell, but here we are,
getting along so well... Truth is, Saturday’s
always trying to one up Friday, and Thursday
is too neurotic not to want the insecurity.
You know how things go, from week to week.
Pipe Dreams
Consciousness up from pipe dreams is no light conclusion.
This takes periods of youthful cognition, unrivaled,
acknowledgement of time fully abandoned. Flora and fauna
whippy through galore days, free from differentiation—
they are the same artifact. In this life, fully abandoned.
Minor matter passes periods off each mean solar day, according
to who wants belongings, or just restraint. Haphazardness skips
punctuation to continue inflections of mustard seed,
grasshopper sex, DuPont toxic oxygen, and processions take
all night, all glorified night, restless, no minutes for problems,
indigent, indulgent, with an indigenous bent on language.
In pipe dreams, humans can be idols of their unreal realm.
Chickens
Some dumb motherfucker
told me after my last poetry reading
I need to talk more about chickens.
Chickens.
Chickens, motherfucker.
Okay, motherfucker,
dumbass Facebook motherfucker—
Chickens,
okay?
Chickens!
One chicken,
some chickens,
fuckteen monkey-assed-tons of damn chickens.
Chicken
chicken Chicken
Chicken chicken chicken chicken
chiCken
ChickeN
cHicKen
chIckEn
That’s all the chickens, Facebook motherfucker.
How Thick This Shit
Oogie boogie, said the man who knows
all the oogie boogie things
Lo and behold, it became a dark side
and they were divinely terrified
The moon tries to stay out of the sun’s way
but good luck with that, said the woman
who holds all the broken parts together
Goof the moon! I say
No one knows how thick this shit gets
Summer Love
mosquito bites bring him back
to the little
blood lettings of childhood
(Trying so sure to be a voice)
Who?
she said like swatting bugs
(The silences got farther inside)
flustered wings make a
stuttering chamber music he can hear
no matter how small the air
how damp
how
summer drags out
turns out pretty birds
are oblivious to kindness
she does not suffer
her attention upon him
him there
remote from urgency
(As far as
a miller moth from the sun)
this is how summer drags out
him burrowing deeper into a wooden self
even as its branches reach
leaves panicked
(Him a pupae cocooned
to outwit death
by never having been born)
Selections from The Sanity Psalms
Trust
If you’re one of them,
you’ll want to eat healthy vegan affairs
instead of tasty sodium meat conflicts,
which could increase
risk-aggravated solutions.
Many people inject raw blood pressure
into health officials
because the Serious Problems Industry
reduced the amount of salt in their food.
Thinking practitioners
don’t help cute animals—
they trust bipedal judgement in a hat.
A Group of Amphibians Typically Characterized by a Lizard-like Appearance
My salamander died. The neighborhood is nothing but sweater weather. White people stole my car. Crime is closely linked to which of the following: peeking at the right time, coveted wives, unfair labor practices, or chance encounters in the Garden of Light. No matter which, paradise washes the feet of mothers. Salamanders and fire seem to have nothing in common. Yet the death of my salamander is a living hell.
Friendship Tattoos
Friendship is witchcraft. Well at least it’s so weird. Trust issues remix, rules of the road, rules of the death note. Death of the virgin, the hired man. The ball turret gunner. I only wanted fun. I desired to devote myself only to the research of truth, by way of whiskey and grass and Edie Sedgwick-like giveaway sex. Slave it up with shackles? Something unexpected this way comes. Friendship, wicked garden, love me so I can fly. No roots, no rules. I am a poison weed.
Uncle Walt
Everyone knows basketball was invented by Walt Whitman, and everybody believes God is a little Indian boy, but Walt Whitman is God and God religiously laughs while a bareback Walt Whitman rides Walt Whitman, taking it to the Mesoamerican hole.
No
reaches go about your toilet
in a lock Zoloft face
jewelry your attending with blackness
ember supply
dirty unhappiness
when you’re saltation in one area of the live
like an old sign winding in the false train
the perspectives are so numerous
shrieking view its knotty to make out the floor
until you slaying it rebounds away the fence
in a gray complex body part of Bolshevik magnetism
field talk long-play to the art of the favored female child
who goes last period
without a grumbling
overwhelmed
it appears by a million emitting motor vehicles all inscribed
No
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