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My Slumlord by Patrick Trotti

living in a $50 a day flop house

stamped baggies: the slumlord of my soul.

rent is due daily and it is too damn high-in both ways,

unending; a self-mutilation mortgage.

gutter view on the fifth floor

no heat just the warmth in my blood stream

as I purify it underneath a lit spoon.

the holy water offered up

bowing at the altar of you HIGHness

the intersection of the cross

vein and needle submerge.

muddied dreams, dark thoughts

the same color as my powdery persona.

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introitus(i)

By Mario Santiago Papasquiaro

 translation by Zach Lindsey

The air slips away

the hilts the cunts

the same dust is not life

/The dawns never/

The day slips away

the haggard shadows, the eyelets

the eye of God that He hires out cheap

the sleeping blacks

of Purgatory Road

the Chiclets sellers

& Abyss brand condoms

the semicolon of sweat

that “ayayay” that gets her knocked up and abandoned

The straight man slips away

the stitched hetero

the motherfucking rambler

the shell without sugar

the coffee without cream

Christ slips away

my songs and my virgins

my bag of blames

in a full garbage can

the crater of my Diogenes

my dirty, vulgar liver

my sun is holding a circus

The battle cry slips away

the Teponaxtle drum never

I want to say that the corn mules

are my comal, my caress, my color and my bray but

what I had said slips away

& until today I spoke

in confidence with demons

I am 1 mute life,

he who forms the gestures, then

begets them/ molds them

I slip away

Yeah, I too slip away

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Night Sky

By Kieron Walquist

Are we the reason why

the sky blushes, cries

and rushes to close its eyes

at night?

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She was just 27

Classic Beatles song updated years later.

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please go to the bottom of this poem straight away and read the last line, then the second last line, then the third last nine and so on until you reach the first line - seriously do not read from the top down, instead read from the bottom up. thanks!

(1) (2) (3) (4) (5) (6) (7) (8) (9) (10)

please rate this poem out of ten by circling one of the above numbers

thank you for reading

you would have been happier and more sympathetic to my apologies

and if you had read it in the way i suggested in the title

which is your choice but i think this poem starts (or ends) much butter then it ends (or starts)

if you didn't and you see me apologising already you have read this poem the wrong way

you were supposed to read from the bottom

i want to apologise for this poem seeing as it is ending now

was that pleasurable for you?

until he gets into bed and does some things i don't know

and analyses this impulse for a few minutes

and imagines himself eating the dog treat

and he gives his dog a highly processed treat

and he feels intense solipsism in a gentle and meaningless way

and he notices that 3 hours and 2 minutes have passed

when his sister was still alive and they were on a beach somewhere

and remembers some things about when he was 30, when he was 20 and then when he was only 6 

and conflates the wind and marx into some private unsayable metaphor 

and listens to the wind and thinks about how pointless it iss

and thinks about how pointless it is

and reads a book of marxist critical theory 

and sits cross legged again next to a mini schnauzer

and washes up his dishes gently

and smiles and touches his own crotch

who he pats once every 5 minutes or so

a mini schnauzer

maybe he will have a dog that sits next to him as he eats

maybe he will burn incense 

and eat it with his legs crossed on a red pillow with chopsticks listening to contemporary german piano music

if he is alone maybe he will cook himself something via an asian cookbook for dinner

maybe he will feel a lot of pressure for various reasons and panic

i wonder if he cares about food and will think carefully about what he has for dinner

to hydrate and to raise his cripplingly low levels of blood sugar

maybe he'll drink water or juice

maybe he will have a shower at his house after getting home

maybe he doesn't have a partner

maybe if he has a partner his partner will call and they will discuss 'turmeric' and 'curry for dinner'

i think he will touch his own crotch quite a lot when he is in his car

i think he will listen to a radio station that plays a depressingly sweet coldplay song after which he will turn the radio off and drive in silence

i think he will drive park his car and for some reason i think his car will be red

ok i will do that

maybe i should imagine what my teacher will do when he leaves this classroom

ok images

how

pleasurable moments to stop people from being bored

what can i do to program human readers to keep reading

maybe my instruction in the title is like a program for human readers

if i programmed a computer to read this poem it would finish it 100% in the way i told it to

really

a computer can't be bored

i think i feel like this because i am imagining someone reading this poem and getting bored and not wanting them to be bored

why do i feel like this

actually i feel like i should write something more pleasurable in this poem now

the title is the whole point of the poem

i feel like any poem would ruin how good the title is

i feel good about the title

maybe i think you were expecting a better poem than this

if i put a scale of 1-10 at the end of this poem do you think reading upside down will change your vote

would it raise cripplingly low blood sugar levels

does it make this poem 'better' objectively

how does reading this upside down make you feel

oi wait

he is wearing a denim jacket hahaha

he is around 65 and british

imagine my teacher's hair right now i told you it is dyed blonde

and they leave each other and don't speak and avoid each other in public

fuck you for reading from the bottom - you are a pussy

and the person who read from the top says

fuck you for reading from the top - you never follow instructions

except then around 5 years later the person who read from the bottom says to his/her lover

and then they meet at this line in the middle and fall in love

one from the top and one form the bottom

i imagine two people reading this poem at the same time

if you didn't stop reading now

did you follow my demands in the title

are you reading this upside down

does it feel wrong to be reading this upside down

there is so much wind outside i feel like having a debate

hahaha

the teacher just said modern literature twice in a british accent

and his goatee

i think the my teacher has dyed his hair blonde

there are other people here too called students

that person is called my teacher

someone is talking to me in a class in a university

i'm not sure why i did this

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Shazambro bundle

  Shazambro!

               Ah, man. This guy, look at him. And you gotta give it up. Just yesterday I was on the main floor doing a little survey, and if the rumors read, then this motherfucker’s touched on almost every girl around here worth getting for the last five years! That girl in the Art department, you remember, looked like Winona Ryder. Or how about what’s her name, that six-foot Dominican piece. And look at this guy. Balding, right up the middle. Look at that gut! He’s been wearing that same inside-out Captain Marvel T-shirt for six days at least, and I should know, I’ve been doing double shifts. You remember that brunette with the ringlets they sent up to the web department? Yeah, with the rack, she’d be wearing that tight, flower-print cocktail dress, man, kaboom! Well, word is, Zambro had her all open down there in the stacks. All over those tits and everything. The whole business got too close for comfort, so he cut her loose, then she went nuts. Crying, whatnot, it was a mess. Which was why she got transferred upstairs all of a sudden. Wait, here he goes . . .

               He passed, and it was the same each day, every week, giving us the head-bob, walking with that little bounce, beneath the awning, down the row of book carts, patting his pockets, and Valdez rushed to take out his own cigarette.

               I’m gonna light up right when he does, wait . . . But seriously, could you even imagine a girl like that getting all heartswept over you? Those lips? The heat of the moment? Think about that. How tall is that guy, like five-six? And you know he’s been wearing that shirt all week. Oh yeah man. Some guys know how to live.

    Technological Laser(Hong Kong 1994)

Open again onto Terra Firma, my world outside of life— impregnable, night-lit avenues, onto looped, winding streets, blurring to the next, the spaceship glow from the dash, breeze pleading from the slit in the window, the shrieking engine, the beaded figurine swinging from the rear-view . . . I’m not drunk, but dog-tired as I slosh against the back seats of the cab. Not a fool, just used to, and by now even comforted by the relentless way the drivers want to get you with the same roundabout hustle, this psychotic, high-speed touring all over the map. Next to me against the headrest is about everything I own, zipped-up in a duffel strained to the seams, and tied to that is the sense that none of this is real enough, not yet, not the teahouse, sitting with my notepad, like some anthropologist, certainly not the Temple Street Y with its maid service and turned over bedspreads, though that I could fix at least, cue the rush, heist flick, stuff my bag then check out, then a cab back into the flotsam sea of streaming lights, hurtling across lanes, downshifting, and what I do know is I’ve got to go deeper.

    Get to the Chopper!

               It was my own fault. In that I felt the need to spring to the phone no matter the hour, no matter what, that gnawing, seething sense of isolation, to the extent I almost felt guilty having been sound asleep at 2am . . .

               “Man, Blue, you awake? So yeah, I was just watching Predator, on cable. Haven’t seen that since, I don’t know, maybe ten years. And maybe it’s an easy call, but you ever get the feeling with some of that stuff, like you’re watching some stag film on the DL? Remember that scene where the Indian guy, out of nowhere cuts off this fat vine and starts sucking that white syrup squirting out of it? What the fuck was that? Or those scenes where Arnold’s like, just gazing at his men jumping around instead of looking for the Predator?”

                 “Wait. Cable—what? ” I sat up blinking on the futon.

“You think it’s a reach? I’m telling you, Some of that shit was uncomfortable to watch. That part where they’re all standing there pumping their rifles, shooting off into the jungle? As the camera pans over their straining faces? Come on man . . .

    What Else?! 

They say it takes an average person about 10 years to master a given thing. This was my thinking in 1995 when I dropped out of college in Iowa City to teach myself to draw comics. Because I’d seen a lot of movies I figured Hong Kong was the place, so I went there, hoping to put a tap on that excitement. After that plan went bust I tried another, then another. I put down the pen too many times to count, only to pick up again because there was nothing else. If there was a theme to come away with it was that nothing is ever as easy or even as worthwhile as “They” make it seem. Almost ten years had passed and I was still just as deluded, my life just as ordinary. Anyway, that’s the short version . . .

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How to use a toilet

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