MANTICORE

you are always
flailing
flailing about
with your terrible
claws

your venom
is nasty
and nobody even
likes you
but manticores
like it better that way




RADIANT MAN

in the Huffin House bathroom
you are glowing every
hour of the night

you watch over me
when I am peeing
always with your
sad & honest eyes
eyes incapable of judgement
eyes just like
your still beating heart

Radiant Man
you are the patron saint
of urine
and we leave our human hairs
in the drain of the shower
as offerings
to your quiet splendor

I know you wish the world
were not this way
but I am glad you will still
accept me as I am
if not always
then for at least as long
as we leave you plugged in




SORCEROR

you are the root
of all my misery

always
watching with your
furrowed brow

your powers
are long and white
like the hairs
on your mage head

that is because
your hair
is where you keep your powers

people say
my poems are
formulaic

but nobody says that
about your magic spells
and when you think about it
those two are not so different

I know you see
a twisted future
when you look through
your demon oculus

the oculus
which you had enchanted
last week

I only wish I could know
your true intention

maybe then
my visions of you
would not haunt me quite so bad

often, I feel
we are nothing but chumps
in your metaphysical game of craps

every time we roll the dice
we roll two
thousand serpent eye balls
but somehow we just cannot
keep from playing

you watch me in your
obsidian orb
as I get home and
sit down at the typewriter:

"SORCEROR

you are the root
of all my misery,"

I write





X

Thirteen

by William Orr

When I was thirteen Lily had a painting over the fireplace inside her parent's huge victorian house. The picture was a woman with a locket around her neck. She told me a story about the woman--an ancestor of hers. Lily said the woman was just sitting around in the parlor minding her own buisiness when all of a sudden a bolt of lightning came down through the chimney and struck her right in her locket. Right here, out of this very fireplace under that painting of a lady it came. After that the woman could not take off the locket ever because it was melded to her flesh for the rest of her life.

Before Lily met me she would masturbate with an electric toothbrush. She had moved on, though. At this time she did it by grinding her crotch into one corner of her matress. She still kept the toothbrush under her pillow as a keepsake. I tried once my luck with her and the toothbrush, but I was thirteen and could not understand such things--things like clitorises--so I was never any good at it. I just could not seem to get it in just the right spot.

I remember Lily telling me the morning after she made a black metal white boy masturbate in her attic. She made him eat his come and watched as he sucked it down, all before Lily was even sixteen years old. When she told me she had done it I was jealous because I knew in that moment she had known what love is.