Chris D'Errico


Sporting a New Gold Tooth

Hack of accidents, dear: do not wait for higher meaning
Avid claptrap of elitist avoidance: sublime violence, defense of hierarchy
Bullets whizzing by: taking off an eyelid, an earlobe
Runaway poured into the mold of a traveling life: fevered in rhythms
       You are the impossible: do not wait for life to reveal itself
All shards and ruin: go to some place, take a position, precious, precarious
       Dreams sluiced wide open: tortured like the people want
In negative space that collapses: wonderful to be imperfect not impervious
Doubts not mute but hardly harmonious: stand, engage, and commit some acts
       Smooth thighs and hot throat: turn, stay, bulls-eye or flail
       You are the improbable: commit some more acts
Swayed by a wounded melody, then more people-stuff: ductile, merciless

       A mess of bird wings and mermaid hair: random by no means
Metal/bone, action: loops of gold or a noose, an internal architecture all its own
You thief with typical excuses, alibis: you horror show of I, me, mine gullibility
Pluck a voice from the void, stick it: junkyard dogs snarling at freedom's gate
       A rat inside the belly of a viper: in recognition of human failure
House rules/fool’s bets, black cards and dust: reactionary critics anchored by prefix
       Dear do not wait for higher meaning: yapping across linoleum
Who was the greatest: Ted Williams or Mickey Mantle, Tupac or Notorious B.I.G.
       Who chokes you up, makes you try harder: Dostoyevsky or Handy Manny
More of a wild boar: boring holes in the wholly bored wilderness of woolly boredom
       Doesn't matter if you're rich or poor: you bleed, right on blood, brother/sister

Dear, do not wait for life to reveal itself: it is, you are, it has, you do, and you go
Just go: disregard grand narratives of minor ambivalence, overcooked tripe
       Nourishment, no cake: humming along melody through static
       Moody starving artist bullshit: brooding dark mysterious creature, residual teen
Angst, requisite unrequited love/lust: hide your arms in church or a factory
Freaked out codependency tendencies: don’t expect a big red bow and a lipstick kiss
       Nix the wait for a feather to wisp across the room: signaling eternal life
You feel screwed and so do I: let’s conform to play out why, purify the rot and sloth
Away from gremlins and science, op-eds and sportsmanship: lucid, molecular
       One foot caught in the slough: mirror of truth or illusory trap

Quake & Quarrel In absolution the sea recedes Her violence tattooed on the arms of the shore         We are left to contemplate Implausibility of permanence, infidelity Of peace                           By the mongoloid rants of humanity Glued to our dirty mirror                        what has been learned The misshape of disgust With the boredom                        of an atheist hearing the same old Sermon performed from Serendipity’s pulpit                               Healing justifies the wound Ask the custodian                               of fear, cartographer of grief Who spits into the eye                                                       Of something greater than history The muse who rants                    with abandonment A hamster on a habit-trail humbled by the inertia Of accomplishment Bits of smashed lives, cadavers Of wood & barren womb          Where (para)dice once impregnated the future Obituaries in sanguine, loaded                 sepia morning                Swallowing the path of least resistance, guts flooded With the importance of prediction                & disguise Knowing each & every grain of sand by name Better to roam wild open                archipelagos Than to infest greasy crevices ripe with the stench Of decay Better                yet to breathe with the ancients Trivial madness shrugged With each quake Each                whip of thunder & froth                                              ^^_______O__________ ^^`^```           Felicity      gardens elegant heights Look down in the drainage    ditches Blunt flabby faces         chiseled by the horror hammer of loss Broken thread     dull needles there is nothing <>          if not infested with injured heroes Hungry blind ants                Unforgiving swill leaching deeper                Endless cascading precipitate of dreams                Thunder fizzled into    vast inevitables                smug cozy of clouds Hope it’s all going      somewhere toward purity <>             somewhere toward going <> all hope clouds in sun         womb Inevitable            in its vast fizzle thunder dreams precipitate cascading in endless deeper leaching swill           while unforgiving ants blind hungry heroes infest juries with nada needles and           dull threads feed on lozenges break hammered chisel faces gone flabby digging ditches           down heights for elegant gardens Grand stone ritual talisman of megalithic monument       henge funerary posthole and/or circular rampart fortified earthwork carved palisade      for inhumation <> Or would you prefer a sky burial <>                When death is really dead hang             your coffin over the craggily gorge let the mountain           rock soul incumbent when the fog         lifts savor your shadowmark with my astrocam or shadowmark my savior-lift while fog       grows incumbent soul then let my coffin hang dead                when burial sky prefers           palisades or carved earthwork fortified for funerary monuments            in some megalithic                               talisman of ritual stone <> It's unbreakable this diamond mind this                cleavage plane you degenerate white dwarf in a shockwave you fused                  my black hole with your milky way only for your own ravenous luminosity                <> Ravenous your way milky your             hole white degenerated plane cleav-      age           mind <> This       ineffable unbreakable it caught in your throat-like dry dust           avenger <> Spit it out chew it swallow it or cough it up so goddamn square             you're forcing tangential flesh wounds boring       a hole in my skull so coal-dumb to        diamonds nascent with your lugubrious      (b)anal retentiveness

Chris D'Errico was born in Worcester, Massachusetts. He writes poems and fiction, plays blues harmonica and lives in Las Vegas, Nevada. For more visit www.clderrico.com.
 
 
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