The Lobotomist

Sharpness of Apathy
                        

The needler pierces the brain again,

Spikey and juvenile,

Into tissues of thought,

Never beginning to care;

He assumes he can pierce it,

With no feeling, no disorganized thought,

The needler pushes,

From cortex to cortex,

Mingling with the indifference of neurons,

Severing the temporal lobe,

He hears a sound;

The tear of flesh,

Smiling now as he puts down the needle,

Hums to himself a familiar song,

And begins to rest.

Conquistador

                        For Hernan Cortez

He stood on his mountain and sang,

Songs of deliverance and rape and torture,

He sat down and prayed to his lord:

His gold and his gems.

He cried out to his slaves,

To lay down their arms:

That would be severed,

If not an ounce of rare metal,

Dug from the mines.

And he dreamed of sickness.

Being the greatest soldier of all,

Taking care of the heathens—

Taking care of his swelling dignity.

Drilling

Never the Same


Her heart was never the same after that day in June,
When I threw her mind right out the back of her skull
With powders and elixirs I conjured up from the past,
Reeling in painful delight, a tasty metamorphosis of
Chemicals to light the way home;
My hands felt like glass worms crawling on her skin that night,
The night when I could feel her heart beating in rhythm with the waning
Gibbous above, pulling the tides, bracing the rocks below me,
I fretted and waited for the idea to pass that this was to last forever,
But it stayed like a skin blight, itching and dancing in serpentine madness,
To the music of emotions.

War Stories

If you don’t know what it is, I ain’t never goin to be able to explain it to you

                                                                                                            --Louis Armstrong

                        War Stories

Grasping an ameliorated heart with the claws of reckoning,

He sees his doppelganger smile to him,

He is improving now.

But he

Walked through with clowns,

And he

Leaned against his romanced reflection,

Hid in secluded wonderment.

He was once a cerebral alchemist,

Understanding the penurious characters

Ubiquitous to his new habitat,

Feeling, just feeling the junk in his veins.

The dreams of carnal nights,

Became reality again,

Under the sheets,

Rolling like thunder.

But distant callings

Said imperatively,

To come back,

It is warm here.

His rapid eyes twitched behind steel lids,

It had him now-- pulling, plummeting feelings.

He held tight onto a childhood blanket;

Bought a ticket

To ride the wall of death one more time

In the carnival where jesters grin from

Their homes of chemical compounds;

Rooftops,

Beaten by the sparkling rain of stars.

And Nasonex would heal the injured adenoid,

Living life swimming

In a colorful garbage sea.

He could clearly see the glass doors opening,

But he was affectively jarred,

Befriended eternal dysthymia when she was gone,

Her ways of understanding the outlines of his mind,

And her love was all he needed,

Sustenance of her powder;

She was his tender junk and helped him see forever,

The fading pictures of girlfriends,

Are replaced by posters of secluded screams.

Now,

His eyes are taciturn and cold,

He sees nothing again.

And the skeleton of his hollowed pen

Points downward to those tender lines of

Destruction and infinity.