PSH: Poets of the Week

Week of June 30 - July 6

Gregory Stant and Brian Bradley

BECOME A POET OF THE WEEK

by e-mailing a few of your shorter pieces or one long piece to me ALONG WITH a brief bio. It's fun, it's easy, it's free. Impress your friends. Impress your mother.

Send to: POTW@PoetrySuperHighway.com

Gregory Stant
gstant@henge.com

Bio(auto)

SpokenWar

(PSH Editor's Note: Gregory lives in Denver, has been previously published, and is not a verbose Bio writer.)

Copper

Waiting for god.
I stop breath, light a cigarette
Someone pushes me
I fall over.
A fat Russian wood doll explodes.
All of the
all-of-me's spill out
empty
They must be waiting for god, too.

Cause when god arrives
god's less than
god's been marked up
god's a rain check
god's got lactose intolerance
god's been stepped on
I've paid too damn much for god

The hours I've invested
praying
without a thought in my head
taste like that time
I got laid
My partners skin
bitter
like sucking on pennies when your really hungry and all you have is this moment
so genuine and tender
but it's acid pennies stuffed in your mouth. god don't answer when you pray
I thought of that time I got laid
It's supposed to be so good
Pennies from heaven
trying to put the little wooden figures back together trying to replace intestine
with a finger
and get this taste out of my mouth

Absolved

I've suckled decades
tasted still water breast
split lips
bled grimace
Actions predestined
fit a script like a
leg fills a trouser
collecting weight
creating orthroscopy

Inertia swings the G machine
I go
nowhere
round in circles
nowhere
I've never moved from here.

Open Gabriel palms
with a need to confess
Apparitions haunt
Ghosts taunt
like a chumline sin
Blood in the water
Stigmata on land
When the wine began to flow
I took my place at the house of plenty
helped myself - freely

Bless me father
I don't know where to begin.

There is entropy in absolution - Genocide in grace. Freedom leaves
ugly spots on crystal
gather round the table and
remind me to clean my tongue
shave my pallate
and see the shrink
before removal and consumption
Menudo Sabado y Domingo

Bless me father
Help me
absolve me loud
Meet me on the dance floor
twirl ecstasy
watch the lights
and kiss me hard on the lips
Lemmie see a hundred dollars
You can count on me father
To repay a kindness with a kill

To be absolved in something
can't see; can't touch
Can't wrap my hands around it;
put my mouth on it
be absolved in homoerotic fantasy
and never stain the sheets.
I see the way your lookin, at me.
and my hard chest
is supposed to weigh like angina
squeezes my butterfly wings
in crucifixion suffocation
The past don't tumble
with the weight of Sisphisus bible
behind the eight ball
becomes comfortable

Derelict in my duty to remorse
I beseech you
hand on robe
lips to ring

Bless me Father
I don't know where to begin
Bless me Father
for I have sinned
Bless me Father
I don't know where to begin
But I believe I know
where to end

Do It

Yeah,

I wanna do it

and I've wanted to do it for a long long time cause I don't like it here, and I don't like life.

Life, you fucking prick, nobody ever said you were fair, as if that morsel of homogenized information was gonna make the bend-over-and-spread em, indignity of this world palatable to my scat stained tongue. I have eaten far too much of your shit, and have no patience with those who minimize your autistic cruelty.

You are too brutal for my sensitive ass. But is sticking my butt cheeks with injections of fear and entropy really in your job description? Don,t you have anything better to do?

I do.

You'll no longer find me out on the streets mixing it up with strangers. My psyche's been withdrawn from the dread depressed chill simple human contact. All of you look like images on the TV screen.

The skin on your faces is taught and drawn. Your lips are rigid and turning blue. Your teeth grind in denial of life's reality. You look like you've been laid once, a very long time ago.

I am shut down like a Pennsylvania steel mill. My emotional union has unraveled and become a deadly over stressed cable whose furiously unwinding strands rip and gouge safety from my heart.

I will keep life away from me

I don,t have much will to live. I do not wish to participate in life. If I do, it's only to relieve the pain. The eats at my soul buffet style. It grazes on ripe dishes of love and laughter while it attempts to devour my artistic endeavor. No, I don,t have much will to live. What I do have is an overwhelming desire not to live in pain.

When I was young I met Art. He was pulling four color silk screen and listening to Frank Zappa. Art had this magic., With a story or a song he excused the pain and replaced it with lies that are more long lasting and necessary than masturbation.

Art lead me to believe I was actually enjoying myself feeding me narcotic lies wrapped in pseudo intellectual discussions about life. The conversations created the illusion that my life mattered.

I follow Art to coffee shops where I can fill my quotient of pretentious self indulgent banter intoxicated with caffeine and dreams of getting laid. My mind becomes oxygen rich from a speed rap stream of conscious shit talk that breed endorphins that tell me: "Yeah Greg! This art shit some good shit, make no mistake about it, good shit." My eyes glaze over. I BUY THE LIE. The life is good lie. The you,re gonna be OK lie. The I am creating therefore everything gonna be all right lie.

I reject and accept a life of honest narcotic lies to protect me from the pain - sincerely drinking your liquor cabinet and injecting the neighborhood pharmacy.

I am skin yellow, near death and you have the nerve to put me in treatment. You should be putting me out of my misery. Give me some smack and a case of Black Jack and I will save us all from a world of shit and heartache.

I want to do it, but

I wish to stop all this fruitless breathing but I got a voice inside my head that will not let me. The truth of doing myself in tells me that god has a piss poor sense of humor for those of us who wish to destroy his creations - flawed as we may be.

I've seen my self administered death. It is not pretty. It's surrounded by white walls, wears white shoes. My botched suicide is helpless and out of control.

See

my suicide ends up with bed sores, pissing through tubes, shitting into bags; forced to breath mechanical still life while its' nurses play rummy. Although the monitor reads brain dead - he hears it all.

Shoots too much speed and suffers from permanent heart damage. You,ve heard it - always out of breath.

Paralyzed from the neck down. Didn't drive too well drunk.

Gives the 12 gauge a piss poor blow job and ends with ground hamburger for a face.

That's why I'm scared. My death always lives. The only way out of this life is through the pain and I don,t suffer well at all.

I want to do it - but I won't

I will write this shit till my teeth are ground down to my bloody gums sucking food and cigarettes through a straw. I will write this shit because IU have lived the consequences of not.

Art's not pretty, but it's an ugly little lie I can live with and use to anesthetize my torment. It's a fable of life I don't have to write in desperation, paint in fear, or punctuate with terror.

So tonight you will find me painting pictures with a brush of tantalizing death. Death passes me, wave and smiles like he's the Grand Marshall in Satan's Rose parade. I stand on lifes' littered sidewalk biting a mangled lip, awaiting release from the bondage of this earth.

And Death waves_ and Death smiles_ but Death doesn't stop - today.

Death, nobody ever said you were fair. You are the ultimate prick tease for those of us who desire your shroud.

I want to do it - but it is not my job

Brian Bradley
wanton@wanton.com
http://www.wanton.com

Bio(auto)

Brian Bradley is a heavily tattooed forty-two year old recovering addict living and working in the Los Angeles area, whose hobbies and interest include Discovery channel, A&E, poetry, music, sex, motorcycles and writing. Brian's work as writer is greatly influenced by twenty-five years of active drug addiction, sex, petty crime. Such experience has given Brian his own unique voice and point of view as a writer. Brian has just completed his first novel Highland Avenue, and is hard at work on his next project. Brian writes poetry in his spare time.

Four AM

when I got up this morning
I felt dead and empty inside
I thought about you
it got worse

Missing

you and your wife
appeared out of the
morning

wrapped in the thin pale morning light
that
cast shadow into empty cheeks
kissing hollow eyes
with sleepless
burning hunger

gaunt skeletons
listening
to the wind
murmuring childhood terrors

now I know why you've been missing

Reverence

little girls parked in waiting
for love, like fallen rose
petals

abandoned by needs and time
incense to call
the pain of others

laughter
and tears from the
heart

hurt people
who
hurt people
with the intention of
giving and sharing

Steamy

what I need is
slow hot steamy fucking in the
back seat of my car. to ease away the
bullshit from work.
the crap from my ex-wife.
and the fucking madness of everyday life so I can forget
anything and everything
except these
moments
with you

Early

she pulled herself on to him
in her need
placing him inside of herself
she tried to drive away the pain
tried to erase
her fathers disease
as she rocked herself
to ecstasy

he looked in the mirror
tying to place the memories
after finding no comfort
in her lust

we all watched in silence

Penis

as a young boy I was concerned
about
the size of my penis

I would stand in the corner
of the shower and try to
touch the end of my penis
in the corner

It would never reach

when I got older
I got in to that elusive corner

but by then I had
other problems
touching my belly button
with the end

once I even decided to
blow myself
no luck
I was unable to teach my
penis any new tricks

stupid penis

I'm forty one now
me and my
penis have an uneasy truce

gravity is
working in my favor