no title.

when i was born the all the hookers near the hospital
wept because they knew they'd be working
for me in less than a year

untitled

puddin told me once
about his cousin
they had all shacked up
in ochelata at the grandparents
because there was
a well stocked deep freezer
she was born with no limbs
at her elbows or knees
just nubs
this didn't stop her mobility
or social life
she would army crawl
to puddins door way
crane her neck
and say things like
"damn brandon if you wasn't my cousin"
with an overly arched back
in a ghetto gangster vernacular
she had a sex life as well but
it was in pawhuska
some black men enjoyed her
company and she was partial to them
"take me to pah-huth-sku
i wanna see my men"
she would scream
puddin would load her
up and driver her there
drop her off then
come home and throw
beer busts in the garage
and dread the phone
call when he would have to go and
load her up and driver her
back home only to be hit on
and bossed around by her

labor & alcohol.

i have to get ready for work
i work a lot
we are busy in the steel shop
i manipulate steel
it makes me beer thirsty
to do this

sunlight can penetrate cool april springs at candy creek to illuminate the red tipped fins of the sunfish which will be our best bait for when the flathead began their early spring floodwater feeding travels
catfishing is delicate like a preying mantis crawling over the fingers of a sleeping infant

termination notice.

i keep that sweet pistol in my truck
so if they fire me
i'm going to show them a party

A SHOT OF LEG.

james "don't call me ron, goddamn" davis
was running his mouth trying to reprimand me
about burning up his electrical wires with an acetylene torch
give me that wrench you gripey old motherfucker
you bitch non stop I hollered at him
do you know where this wrench was made
taiwan, you ever been with a taiwanese girl
you papa smurf looking piece of shit
his eyes got wide and he smiled at me
and said as a matter of fact i have
i even got a picture of her
the next day he brought in his navy scrap book
and showed me the girl he called leg
she was gorgeous it must have been 1970
fake eye lashes and a heavy coat of make up
he told me how he had bought her and had the receipt
as well she had cost him 400 taiwanese dollars
which was around 8 dollars back then he said
he stayed the night with her and was in troube
when he got back to the ship the next day
he had other pictures of other ports with other prostitutes
and tales of getting butterfly knives and baseball bats
pulled on him for various drunken behavior
now he's an electrician who talks to me like
i'm a three year old and always complains about
the way I do things opposed to how he would
do things.
he lives in sapulpa
walks with a limp
and drinks whiskey alone
wishing for just
one more shot of leg
he said

barber.

I like buzz cuts with a 1/8" guard
I like my wolfman hair shaved
off so I have a slick clean neck
for the ladies
My old barber was a real mean heartless man with a cruel disposition
he called my hair cuts short and sweet
and they were something from the
50s I believe
he shook terribly when he cut my hair and the fear he instilled in
me with those trembling razor sharp scissors making movements of a drunken two step around my upper ears were the stuff
nightmares are spawned from
cussing the president
cussing the city counsel
cussing the doctors
there was always an audience
of two to 6 other old men
some of whom only had tuffs of
powder white hair on the sides
their wives had dropped them off
so they could sit in the barber shop with each other and wait on death
when he died I began shaving my head with store bought clippers
I remember going to the barber shop and some of his kids were loading up his equipment
wondering how much they could get for their old mans tools of the trade
maybe 20 bucks at a pawnshop I heard one of them say
why don't you go to the mall to get
your haircut young man
an older lady said to me as I was standing there missing those
shakey hands and spiteful words
I came here more for the conversation
I replied
and haven't been to a barber
since

it was the one at tuxedo
and 75

no title.

i worked with charley "motherfucking" eastman and
james "goddamn" davis last night
they are both in their mid fifties and angry all the time
rose came by who has recently won 190 thousand dollars in
the progressive wheel of fortune slot machine
she gets boils around her privates and her face is covered in age lines
she was selling chinese food for lunch
james said to her whatever your selling
i ain't buying unless its pussy
take your ass to 11th street motherfucker
she barked back at him
when she left I told them
rose was with child
my child
she may be fifty but my seed took
i told them
I explained it happened in the smoke hole
two months ago long before she ever became
rich
thats when charley chimed in and said
great not only is the baby going to be
fat but its going to be ugly too

the feral hogs of makota.

today at lunch grandma told
me how her dad in in his youth rid
matoka of its feral hog population
they dug a huge
8 foot deep circular
trench leaving an island center
in which a pen was built to hold a couple
of female domesticated sows
the boars one by one after a month
long or so period fell victim to their
natural urges and were shot
in the head and no more hunting
hounds were lost to the feral hogs of
matoka

NO TITLE AS OF YET.

danny gosney has a german shepherd named wally whose winter coat is thick as berber carpet but what other dogs have you owned i asked danny
i once raised a coyote he told me
he bottle fed it and then it turned on him
and bit him through the thumb
it had to be put down and his head lopped off
and sent to oklahoma city to be tested for rabies

untitled

puddin told me once
about his cousin
they had all shacked up
in ochelata at the grandparents
because there was
a well stocked deep freezer
she was born with no limbs
at her elbows or knees
just nubs
this didn't stop her mobility
or social life
she would army crawl
to puddins door way
crane her neck
and say things like
"damn brandon if you wasn't my cousin"
with an overly arched back
in a ghetto gangster vernacular
she had a sex life as well but
it was in pawhuska
some black men enjoyed her
company and she was partial to them
"take me to pah-huth-sku
i wanna see my men"
she would scream
puddin would load her
up and driver her there
drop her off then
come home and throw
beer busts in the garage
and dread the phone
call when he would have to go and
load her up and driver her
back home only to be hit on
and bossed around by her

kayhawkays first fried potato

She was living west of the Ochelata cemetry at the turn
of the century with her folks
in a two room log cabin with
a yard full of daffodils
when she met my great grandpa
his parents had her over for supper
her mother didn't have a stove
and cooked by the fireplace
mostly boiled food from a
black kettle
she was worried about the fried
root and only took a little
for fear she wouldn't like it
a couple of weeks later before the
marriage she confided in my great
grandpa that she didn't know how to
fry anything
he told her not to worry
after the wedding he sold two good wagon horses
to an osage for 35 dollars apiece
went to bartlesville and came back with a cook stove and
fried potatos became as familiar
as her old family's boiled spuds
but as she put it
translated
"much more tastier"


I was just told this tale by grandmother over two eggs sausage texas toast and german style blackberry jam.

UNTITLED

the heroin problem is
so bad in dublin
some public restrooms
in high use areas
are illuminated with
blue lights
when I was younger
my grandma used
the green husks
of walnuts to make
a pulpy paste
that stained my hairless
underarms a tannish green
the reason being for the blue
lighting is that it makes it
harder for the intraveinous
user to locate a vein
she explained that the walnuts would
help me to have a more pleasant
smell when I became a man
i'm sure people still shoot up
in the blue light
because grandmas
87 and still lives under that
walnut tree
and that goddamn remedy
didn't do a thing for my odor

three fishy things

mr ronnie agnew
***
red scottish bushy
beard wet with
busch beer foam
rolling blood
bait on brass
fish hooks
with black thread
on the white
rocks of
winganon bridge
singing about
the speckled channel
cat and content
with a blue ice
chest of tolerance
for being with me

*************************

There was this man
who had the tips of his
fingers disfigured on the
ends of them
they were strange balls
of scar tissue with the most
mishapen brown specs of
finger nail growth
They worked good for him
when handling his fishing pole
and he was more than
proficient at catching
catfish
below winganon bridge
one evening my dad
told me on our swivering
back road drive home
from the lake
to ramona that the man
had been tortued by means
of having bamboo splinters
shoved up under his fingernails
I figured that the war
was still going on for him
but now
battling those
spiny barbed fish
had taken the place of
the VC and their punji sticks

*************************

bait shop traffic
***
he has got one lung
but enough nightcrawlers
and minnows to keep the towns
poles baited three times over
on a hill across from the cemetery
seperated by only a deep valley
nevermind that the swarms of mosquitos have reportedly carried
small children as far away as
ochelata before discarding their
bloodless bodies
the talk is that the speckled
channel cat have never bitten better

*************************

untitled poem

cotton doesn't have a
last name
just a slick shiny black
scalp and always
a friendly greeting
he takes the orders from
the shop workers everynight
at 7:30 pm sharp
the people get in a line
and he jots down there
requests with a bic ball point pen
onto a tattered oily spiral notebook
He's developed a form of short hand for taking down the menu items
A Lebanese family has a bbq joint near pine and mingo where he picks up everyones meals
The meals come in small brown paper sacks with grease stains
complete with plastic silver wear
napkins and two packs of hunts ketchup
I once asked someone standing in line
why does cotton do this for everyone
they replied oh he gets his meal free for giving them the business
oh I said then began dog hunching the air with my tongue out moaning
fried bologna sandwich while trying to put my hands on their peckers to no avail

the panther of skull hollow

The men meet
at the post office downtown
with coleman lanterns
dirty fingernails
bad breath
and rusty rifles
Their wives are always
sleeping with everyone
in town but them.
these women are shoving them
out the door telling them
to bring back that cat.
The party moves out east
of town in the back of an old
rickety pick up just as the
dark orange october sun is
swallowed up by the vastness of
osage county
The men dream of that cat as being
the trophy that would let them back into their wives intimacy
but
most men who live out east of town
would tell you that cat
doesn't even exist

emory bacon

emory bacon
lived two houses down
and drank moonshine from
plastic gallon milk jugs
he only wore overalls
and kept a very messy house
when I was younger playing in the yard
I heard an explosion and saw the rise
of a huge column of orange and black flame
upon rushing to his aid
I found him on his back
with a lawn mower engine
just in front of him
still ablaze
drunken thrashing
trying to get up
mumbling goddamn
over and over
his eyebrows were gone
and one of his old saggy
wrinkled titties looked
a bit charred
dangling out the side of
his bib
I rarely have ever laughed
this hard

gut bucket

it was mid august
when the fire
department pulled up
to the shack next to
moms trailor
we heard a knock
at the door and it
was little michael dale
he asked when the last
time we had seen
our daddy was
shit man I don't know
I looked at my sister and
she shrugged
months maybe like
two or so
we are bad with time
well the neighbor north
of his house is saying
she smells death
he may have died in there
we're going to take a look
oh really I said
we ran to the windows
watched as they entered the house
with blue gloves
and respirators
they came out gagging
we laughed watching them
catch their breath
it turns out my dad
and his buddy had left a
bucket of catfish guts
in a drunken stupor in the
house and they had
ripened up real nice
he was living on the east
side of town and was amused
at the news of his
apparent death

I love the downtown tulsa library.

I like it in august with the homeless on the second floor amongst the outdated newspapers from different cities
when at one p.m. outside the heat from beneath your feet is like breathing diesel exhaust
and getting inside to the smell of sanitizer and maybe a few sniffs of the inside of an old book with yellowed pages is as welcomed and familiar as last weeks weather from phoniex

the vomit part 817

I'd been drinking
with a scotch girl
canadian club
reserve
shooting shots
with miller
high life
the drunk was
warm and suttle
tim and eric
and mr show
good company
and a black lab
named bean
I was picked up around
midnight and passed
out with a friend
at 4:49 am I awoke
and thought I would
type some more
I cracked open
another beer
and took a
big chug
upon swallowing
my mouth began
to water
oh shit
the water closet
divides two
bedrooms and
this one felt
wretched
I opened the
front door
and the dew
was heavy on
the cars in
the street
and cement
sidewalks
which made them
glisten
I walked to the
side of the porch
and put my hands down
flat on pseudo marble
stone
the first heave was still
cold
the second five eruptions
were liquid and tasted
of cheap bourbon
the only sounds I heard
were of me gasping for
air after each
spew
and the humm of
tires passing by
on the freeway
a hundred yards away
i came in washed my mouth
out and crawled back
in bed