Heath Brougher


Existentialism Is a Candyfloss 

I’ll probably be crucified for this
but I don’t just think, I know,
that Sartre had absolutely no idea 
what the fuck he was talking about at times. 

There! I done it! 
Attack me now! 
Feed me to the phony-ass Christians!—
ya know, for Sartre’s sake.

He had some good ideas 
but still wrought his share of paper knives.

“There was a time when only philosophers 
attacked philosophers…” shut the fuck up!

The Universe has always been quite ill tempered.



Pineal Perceptions (Part 7)

Spumescent adversaries
mythological consciousness 
waxen indentation 
creationless servitude
faux lifespan
eternal nonexistence 
peeled eyes
massive microdoses 
authentic opportunities 
dislodged churning
thoroughly thiamine 
corporeal impossibilityism 
model modalities 
redhead dream 
oops tissues
impatient iPods 
dud hierarchies 
requisitioned treasure
mathematical mistletoes
puritanical thalidomide 
lugubrious lubricant 
strident osmotic
diffused circuitry
golfed godheads 
substantial sunbeams 
fourclove(r)n luckburst 
fishwife crowdpleaseer
hopping houses
patchworked overman 
groggy goodbyes 
turntable threesomes
ethos rethunk
victory trapezius 
asthmatic elephants
iridescent birch 
speaking glyphs 
twirlybird transistor
enunciating grandiloquence  
obliviously freedomless
grandslam celebrations
champagne unloaded
pyroclastic godflow
ashridden grackle
moldy bronchitis 
seize shoes
eternally wideopen
burntup eyes. 



Numbers 

The number 2. 
Tilting 88 millimeters to the left.
Taking 101 breathes per day.
Falling 7, 447 feet down a hole.
Pulling 11, 087 teeth out every week. 
Dropping 2, 179, 001 hits of acid each year.
Freeing 14, 181, 514 refugees in a decade.
Pinching 888, 591, 109 children’s cheery cheeks within a century.
Murdering less than 199,872,817,401 human beings in a millennium.
Wiping 87, 178, 941, 225, 791 tears from various faces within a lifetime.



The Aristocrat’s Hay(na)ku

Will
you spit
in my mouth?

Heath Brougher is the Editor-in-Chief of Concrete Mist Press as well as poetry editor of Into the Void, winner of the 2017 and 2018 Saboteur Awards for Best Magazine. A multiple Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net Nominee, he received Taj Mahal Review’s 2018 Poet of the Year Award. He is the recent recipient of the 2020 Wakefield Prize for Poetry and is slowly starting to wade back into the world of focusing on his own work, with 4 books due out in the near future.

 
 

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