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Force of July
Got something to slather you
something to do with words born in Texas midnight raw where we crawled through an Amerikan night wilderness leading us astray on a journey into inner space dreamtime
this is the infinite void
worked into nothingness
the totality of everything that ever was
is
everything else in-between
you mention HER
I picture pastel mongoloid cookie-cutter houses in the suburbs
sheer picture-perfect success with rage driven automaton cruel and bizarre transpiring going on
silk blown ooze encrusted skin shackled to the wall atop a mattress with an Amerikan flag draped over it
and you wonder why I don’t bother with patriotic capitalistic dreams fueled by Ayn Rand and a blonde-haired blue-eyed AR-15 pumping Jesus
I’m not from Texas
but I like to go there
born and dwelling in West Michigan
Bible Belt of the North
which is anything but godly
a crusade of artificiality
ready to tear this false paradise asunder
taking names
screaming in the wild
true independence
for this holiday feast
Love’s End
It could’ve been fate
star crossed moon harassing Saturn
a cascading series of death and rebirth
your apartment was like a second home to me
when you told me how we met two decades ago
I had forgotten
yet you remembered what I wore, how I abruptly left after your joke
“Mike Zone, you must really get around…”
yeah, I had no sense of humor back then as you wrote in a journal
I’m going to marry this man
damn poets
when being brutalized a decade later
full of god knows what chemicals
being recorded
you recalled me and a page from a torn notebook
only to conceive a lifeform together ten years later
hopes were gathered
you mentioned the names Aron and Thea
then demanded money to eradicate it
using the fact that I left another woman for you
deeming it “betrayal”
damn poets
you may ignore me now
but when the next bastard comes-
and he will be a bastard
I will no longer be there
to pick up the pieces
for anyone
damn poets
this is how love ends
Corporate Knife Fight
When you accept a promotion, you don’t want
triple production
build a department from the ground up, only to be hindered at very pivotal unnecessary turns in the process
sometimes it’s limited access to technology
or some power hungry narcissistic high school kid that never grew up
maybe you found hair in some concentrate and shatter
perhaps it was the mold growing on the medical grade wax
or the fact you couldn’t inventory something because someone didn’t put the name in the system and didn’t want you to even though you could
then there was your boss’ boss
the one who flew in on a private jet
who rode his motorcycle in
looking like a sons of anarchy reject
covered in almost cartoonishly satirical tough guy tattoos
yet not man enough to confront you
he yells at your boss
who yells at you
in front of everyone
“Face the wall! Eyes down on the scale! No talking!”
that’s when you turn evidence into the state
comply with everything for about a week
then jot an email
to your boss’s boss
director of east coast operations
GO FUCK YOURSELF
taking your whole crew with you
New Season
The long hot summer careens by through a furious breeze whipping up the sands of time
reflections and ravages
crash test dummy drivers and passengers slamming into walls
falling off cliffs into stagnant infernos
five years it takes to fully accept the death of the woman who bore you
let’s trade that acceptance for the death of pending offspring and forsaken love
oh, wait my best friend just bludgeoned a five-year-old girl to death with a hairbrush
it’s not Hitchcock
but it’s real
years before he stopped me from putting a noose around my neck
laughed as I showed him the nail
and showcased a stretched-out rope
what?
did I just switch this narrative?
past tense? present tense? future tense?
first person? second person?
how about just tense?
my mind is a bullet train speeding through the force of it all letting discarded realms of time’s past burn
that sand is ash
it blows away into the negation of wasteland blues
I’ve learned to move in a desolate harmonious eternity that maybe more copper than gold
at moment
Unhinged?
Maybe, I’ll slip razorblades underneath my skin
dig them out after a bit of healing
with a webcam on beforehand
live broadcast
is this poetry?
I’ll ask
is it?
Mike Zone is the Editor in Chief of Dumpster Fire Press, the author of Shedding Dark Places (almost), One Hell of a Muse, A Farewell to Big Ideas, and Void Beneath the Skin, as well as coauthor of The Grind and frequent contributor to Alien Buddha Press and Mad Swirl. His work has been featured in Horror Sleaze Trash, Better Than Starbucks, Piker Press, Punk Noir Magazine, Synchronized Chaos, Outlaw Poetry, and Cult Culture Magazine.