poem: wE aRe aLL JunKIes sOMe DayS

We Are All Junkies Some Days

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the sun sits above trees and mountains
and yellow sand deserts
there are no clouds
only
a slight breeze

monsoon season lingers in Arizona
black storm clouds gather over Oklahoma
her voice gray and dying
a mother should not have to bury her son

2 poems -

again

and again,
streets fill with debris,
newspapers drift languid
without direction
or guidance
snow melts so soon
fill concrete rivers
with cool water

on television
news show report
small things
as Events of the Century

i wonder

it will be morning soon
another day

things will not feel
different
very little has changed
the Koi still swim tight circles
cats still wait for breakfast
a full-length mirror reminds me
of details i already know

if i could dance
i might
but my limbs are not my own
nor are my thoughts

poem

in a suspended state of otherness

let me fold into you

for a moment
maybe two
linger
	just awhile
let the clear focus
of reality
			blur
let midday sun
bleed through
open windows
	without curtains
let me melt onto you
my skin to yours
  

rusty truck –

i am in rusty truck with some quite stellar company.

these are the poets:

Alan Catlin, S.A Griffin, D.B. Cox, Bradley Mason Hamlin, F.N. Wright, Jack Henry, Raindog, and Scot Young.

Cover art by F.N. Wright.

you can see the edition at issuu, that’s here.

beat the dust –

hey there, hi there, ho there –

jck HNRY here and I am a pissed, a little annoyed, and a bit blue balled. In other words, same as it ever was.

Wanted to let the three and a half people who actually visited this ass-fucked little blog that I have three poems in the always delightful, BEAT THE DUST. They are drawn from the book, WITH THE PATIENCE OF MONUMENTS, available now at AMAZON and POWELLS, and directly from me, jck HNRY. I honored to be cast in it with a collection of stellar writers:

john dorsey
steve finbox
david blaine
fred dagenham

and

jeff aubert mini-interviews with mark safranko and dan fante

so go now and enjoy all that there is to enjoy…

red lincoln – part one

Welcome to Lolita’s

Nothing interesting happens at Lolita’s House of a Grind, at least during daylight hours. Of course your definition of “nothing” and “interesting” might vary somewhat from my own personal definition. Not that I have seen it all, more than most, less than some, but it takes a great deal to meet my criteria of “interesting.” A one legged little person stripper (I am told that I can no longer use the expression “midget” or “dwarf” or “fucking tiny little person”) can be interesting. A 6 foot blondnwith fake 38 DDs and an addiction to violent men, cocaine and cash no longer qualifies. A part-time cop that deals dope during his off-the-cop-clock hours? Definitely interesting. Hookers turning tricks in the bathroom of a strip club? Let’s see…b-o-r-i-n-g. During the last three years working the front door of an out-of-the-way, minimal compliance to laws, rules and regulations of modern society, God and the less than great state of California has left a bit cynical. As I said, during daylight hours, nothing interesting happens, but at night the rules change. Most days I can be found at Lolita’s, either working the front door, bouncing lowlifes, getting crunked in the men’s room, breaking up fights between the girls and the clients, bribing cops, connecting buyers and sellers, sweeping up or smoking. When I agreed to work there the boss told me each night would be different. Again, it comes down to definitions. In the big picture, nothing every really changes, day in day out, at Lolita’s House of Grind. The first night I went into the dancers changing room and found 6 relatively attractive women in various stages of dress and undress, I thought I had the perfect gig. But now? Three years gone? I mean, don’t get me wrong, I love tits and ass, but the club burns out 50 to 75 girls a year. Few stay more than a month, about ten last a year and one or two have been here all three. I would be lying if I said Lolita’s is something special. It’s not. Just a shitty like joint in a shitty little town in a shitty part of an increasingly shitty state.

red lincoln – part two

Dasha Walked Out of the Desert

Dasha walked out of the desert carrying a 1930s tweed suitcase and a Mossberg 12 gauge shotgun. It took awhile to find that out.

I saw her in the distance, a small dot bouncing through waves of heat rising from the desert floor. Vultures circled over head. Random dogs passed through my line of site. Trucks and cars buzzed down the highway at random intervals. A woman in her mid-50s, just over 5 foot, just over 200 pounds, wearing a pink and yellow day dress and blue slippers, yelled at her husband as she stood by the passenger door of a late model Pontiac at the Shell Gas Station located five hundred yards south of Lolita’s. The man, just as short, just as fat, balding, black slacks, button-up short sleeve, thick glass, yelled back. Their exchange of curses increased in volume and in vulgarity until the woman flung herself over the front hood of the car, nearly landing on the man. She gripped him by the throat and threw him to the ground, her arms flailing as she beat the absolute shit out of him. I looked back toward the woman in the desert, with the suitcase and the shotgun, and stared, crunked out of my mind on high grade speed, tongue working my mouth, fingers twitched and my focus absolute.

“Hey man. What’s up?” A short sub-human with a flat face, simple eyes and long wannabe rocker hair slaps a pair of crumpled twenties into my fist, snapping me from reverie.

poem: sitting at a red light on Main Street as a train passes by

sitting at a red light on Main Street as a train passes by

a train pulls through a quiet town
engineer sounds the horn
a car pulls to a red light that slides to the rhythm
of a midnight breeze

there are stars that fill a December sky
a sky so large
a sky so vast the heart aches at its simple touch

poem: through it all

through it all

and the screaming just didn’t stop
my scream
our scream
together and separate
blended into one, into many
fragmented by motion and violence
and an air thick with hesitation

epic rites releases -

upcoming

“The Broken and The Damned by Jason Hardung is a love poem for the schools of lost children. The story of a boy waiting at the corner of lost and found for the light of his mother’s eyes to change to gold, a long drive into that dark episode we call father that always finds us where we live. These hungry poems will inhabit you like a junkie’s old leather coat, the fix is verse. They need to be held and read out loud to your delinquent heart. Hardung’s history packs a .38, does time, rides shotgun with a Cadillac moon singing liberation lyrics that will provide a solid rush, that healing you get when you first feel the poem enter the bloodstream.” – S.A. Griffin

90 pages
perfect bound
$15 USD

edited by David McLean
exterior concept and design by Pablo Vision

available now

After reading hellbound by David McLean I contemplating kicking my kitten, punching a wall, or doping up to kill the pain. It’s that good… McLean’s poetry comes at you on all levels except subtle. Powerful, delicate and written in a style all his own; McLean digs deep into the cultural psyche of Pinhead – and along the way, lays ruin to our own sense of being, worth and reality. McLean’s poetry has always kicked your balls until you puked; with this volume, you’re choking on blood and praying for replacement. – Jack Henry

48 pages
saddle stitched
$7.50 USD

edited by Wolfgang Carstens
exterior concept and design by Pablo Vision

“With a body bag full of bloody memories, broken dreams and tormented visions of the future, American poet Rob Plath trudges through the darkened alleyways of your moral high-ground. His “a bellyful of anarchy” is a tour de force dissection of a world gone rotten.” – RD Armstrong, publisher Lummox Press

302 pages
perfect bound
$25 USD

edited by Wolfgang Carstens and David McLean
exterior concept and design by Pablo Vision

Mark Walton writes in his poem Plural Possessive, “We eat slivers of exquisite rarities,” and that’s exactly what these poems are themselves. Mark’s attention to detail is extraordinary. It’s obvious he’s a true poet who “sat cat-like for hours” jabbing the keys, the blood in the ten wands of his hands throbbing, longing and far, far from frostbitten. And although a majority of the subject matter is “the hard truth of a winter’s night,” Mark’s passion for human connection and for the written word widens and widens: “Give me tendrils not ribbons/Give me roots not stems/Give me fields not vases/Damn your bouquet/Give me a hedgerow.” Mr. Walton’s outstanding craftsmanship is obvious, but it’s his emotional release that will floor you. These poems save us, heal us “as the world turns on its own spit.” And although the voice speaks of “scars” that will be “taken to the grave,” there couldn’t be a more flawless collection of poems in our hands. – Rob Plath

48 pages
saddle stitched
$7.50 USD

edited by Wolfgang Carstens
exterior concept and design by Pablo Vision