Sobriquet

Eaten By Trees

Check Eaten by Trees out on facebook and bandcamp.

www.facebook.com/eatenbytreespoetry

www.eatenbytrees.bandcamp.com

7th Apr 2012

So Eddie and I have this project called “Eaten By Trees”, a poetry zine/musical spoken word act. This is the cover of the zine that will come out in the near future.

Doppelganger

Running on multicolored Plexiglas

Shattered dilations popping veins from

Unearthed consciousness in

Unsettling kaleidoscopic rhythms.

Grandma smiles at me from upstairs

But she is in the kitchen telling me she doesn’t exist.

Hysterical moonlight casts puppet shadows on

Hypodermic needles brushing past my skin.

Grandma pulls the magic bullet from my head,

Or pushes it in deeper as her mask starts peeling.

And I can’t tell what’s real anymore,

chasing ghosts around the kitchen table

while watching chuckling children

tear off grandma’s face.

Undo this, undo it now, I scream

Pushing blankets from my body.

A knock on the door.

It’s time for breakfast,

Grandma says.

Painting at the Cockroach house

I’m painting around cockroaches streaming from the cracks in the walls

in a house ill fit for people to eat a meal in, sleep on a mattress with their heads straight.

You can’t hold me tight enough because

the mice in the corner are plotting their next move

to keep that rustling and scratching from leaving my brain.

I’m just the painter boy,

imagining how the landlord who hired me lives

with the fact that he covers the windows with towels to hide the broken glass,

tells me to do a mediocre job, “just put paint on the walls” he says,

“because the next tenants will be evicted anyways.”

The endless piles of beer cans and moldy clothes in the basement

stand as burial mounds in the battle between renter and property owner.

Sticking out of those mounds are old pictures.

One is a beautiful dark skinned baby with braids, a half smile.

Her eyes capture the noise of gunshots, roaches ticking away by her bedside,

the screams of “I can’t take this anymore!”

And yet, she has that half smile, still strong against the aches of home.

The landlord’s baby doesn’t know what that feels like,

surrounded by still, cream colored walls and the goo goo ga gas

of visitors trying to impress with an embarrassing mimicry of language.

And so I paint on smoke stained walls,

covering up the disheartening lives

of the people in the photographs,

so that more pictures can be taken.

Firefighters are letting houses burn because they aren’t getting paid and there are only three in our small town, letting gangs burn down ten times as many houses as there are people to put out the flames. I had to spray paint on my house yesterday, words dripping “please don’t burn down, I live here,” so that my t.v set with five channels has a place to rest without fire melting its body.

I keep my wallet sewn to my underwear, take out each stitch to buy a bagel, and quickly sew it back up in fear of the robber behind me. I count each finger and toenail before I go to bed because someone is bound to steal them in this town. The army is too busy taking away homes halfway across the country when they could be protecting the ones right here. Or maybe they could stop throwing billions into bombs and throw some to us for once.

I wear big black shades to cover my crusty, pink rash of an eye and people don’t have a clue, I’m still cool until I walk into my piss stained house, five brown puppies clinging to their mother mutt with utters sagging on her belly, and I feel the burden to be the slave master, sell them off one by one because the smell of puppy puke and pee makes me too damn queezy. People are getting pink eye and they are looking at me.

I now own a sunglasses shop so the people I gave pink eye can cover it up with shades and go on with their lives, spreading diseases and looking cool while they do it. Those puppies are still for sale and you can get one so that you are still entertained when your t.v set and house is burned to the ground because the spray paint didn’t work.