24/7
The cops are at the door right now
looking for me. Tune in, tune in, tune in. If you don’t want me to jump, let me
know. I like to drink and laugh, and I like to get laid like everybody else.
Could I please get some viewers? The open eye is very human. There’s also a
darkness. Sometimes it’s accidents, too. The headless torsos usually have this
Elvis stance. It’s just a family of everybody. I have explained this time and
time again, but they won’t listen. The one who tires, loses.
A
Plague of Angels
They arrived at night. They wanted to
kill because they all had knives. We said hello and shook hands with them. I
wasn’t thinking of anything. I just did it. I didn’t realize until later that
many of them were criminally insane. Hence the bad weather, the hunger, the
kids dying in the countryside. Every time we thought we had shut the siren off,
the siren sounded again. We were all in shock and those who could lie on the
floor did so. The rest sat outside and drank tea by the fire each morning and
each evening. I wouldn’t have turned down wild dragon blood if it were offered.
Shadows had to suffice for the real thing.
Reality
Engine
Don’t mess with women who are into gore.
They’re feeling the pain. They’re imagining the pain of the bullets hitting
them. She’s got her boyfriend’s entrails in her backpack. It’s too awful here.
Yesterday she was crying in the night because of this place. We studied in the
daytime and listened to bombs in the night. We heard something that sounded
like rocks being unloaded from a dump truck. People were shouting, “Run, run!”
I stepped out to take a look, and I saw one of the nearby houses coming our way
amid a cloud of smoke. Again, they strapped me to the jeep and made the rounds
of the villages. I looked just like someone whose insides were cracking open.
When it’s evening, I see them in my thoughts, coming again to take me away.
The
Colorful Shadows of Imminent Danger
The projectionist once in a while would
make a mistake and put reel four before reel two. People still made sense of
it. As long as you knew the alphabet and could count, you could watch America
go by. I completely collapsed, and my children were wondering why I was crying.
The important thing was to go into another world. Ideally, you would have a
quiet, dark room – no interruptions. There were 20 guys down there when I
started. I heard the cries of “Attack! Attack!” You could feel the ground
shake. “Oh shit!” someone said. “This is it.” The whole area was bright. I was
feeling that boom till the morning. Now I’m the last one. It feels like my
heart is going to stop. Everyone is running after gold. Some dumb girl is
running through the woods naked screaming. She’s the reason this is about to
happen to you.
Flies
That Start With the Letter ‘M’
I heard him load a gun. And then I saw
his gun was black and his jacket was black.
“So, how does the story end?” my daughter asks me. To all these
questions, I could answer yes. I begin explaining the dust of this planet, the
pre-digital clouds. Either a bomb was planted or someone blew himself up.
There’s flesh and blood everywhere. “I thought everyone would run past me and
save themselves,” I say. It’s a horrible way to search. It’s like you’ve lost
your car keys at night in your backyard and you’re looking for them through a
toilet paper roll with a flashlight. I’m going to leave flowers at the place
where it happened. That place could actually be in your head. It’s quiet. Like
flies stuck against the glass.
Dirty
Deals with Dictators
It’s now a crime in Utah to harass
cattle with drones. The really strange thing is that no one thought this was
strange. They want to see the trapeze artist fall and the lion tamer killed. If
we don’t protest, can it be assumed that we concur? The minute you saw people
running, you knew what was up. Sweden had been attacked. There was a nasty bug going
around eating them in Spain. This is our history, everywhere full of blood.
Today there was even a shortage of coffins. So, you play The Beatles’ “A Hard
Day’s Night” at a relatively low volume, pretending it’s from the military
speakers 200 yards away.
Howie Good is the author of The Loser's Guide to Street Fighting, winner of the 2017 Lorien Prize from ThoughtCrime Press, and Dangerous Acts Starring Unstable Elements, winner of the 2015 Press Americana Prize for Poetry. He co-edits White Knuckle Press with Dale Wisely.