Alligator Poem #26/ I missed a day because I was at the Mass Poetry Festival and then I was tired of all things poems

Q: Where was your poem yesterday?

A: Inside of your mother,

dreaming and floating and hissing.

Q: What does an alligator dream?

A: Redness,

bottomless rot,

screams like static

screams like burst pipes.

Q: What are the noises an alligator makes?

A: Crunching

hissing

scuttling with black claws along floorboards

tiles

carpeted bedroom floors

Q: When mating?

A: Low moans.

Throbbing.

Inarticulations.

A: How is an alligator born?

Q: An alligator must kill the membrane

it is born into.

A thousand beaches are littered with the ivory tissue

of an alligator's first kill.

Alligator Poem #25

Television eye opens: blurred landscape, blotted clots, black rims.

Television eye opens: blurred clots, blurred--

Television eye opens: blurred and blotted clots. The yellowed eyes of alligators. The green leather of their terribleness, black and silver in television lights.

Television eye: on leather.

Television eye: on hissing.

Television eye: on yellow teeth.

On eternity.

On black and white eternity.

On blood and leather.

This entire landscape is a smear in the television eye.

Alligator Poem #24/ for Tadd

This is a day late because blogger wasn't working yesterday. On a related note, poem #23 is no longer showing up. Where did it go?

Wild dogs emaciated crouch against a cancer lit skyline, wild dogs, in their foam-blood licking black claws, grizzled paws. Against these cancer lit skies, these heathen landscapes, comes the beating heart of an alligator, the culmination of these leather days of holocaust.

Alligator Poem #23/ Bison Poem

Remember those prairies vivid with the black tufts of bison. Their aimless mooing and slow paced grazing. How they trimmed the prairie grasses with lazy pride while all around them clots of arrows and the horrid yelping of maniacs.

Now only the swamps of alligators. The slow feeding of alligators. On dense clots of meat. On pond scum. On the floating of what was once alive.

Alligator Poem #22

Dear alligator, your deadwater fumes are wilting the wallpaper. Dear alligator, your soul is a great lagoon. Dear alligator, your skull is on my desk. Dear alligator, your eyes are glass, obsidian. Dear alligator, there is no heaven for you, only more leather, only boots, satchels. Dear alligator, the obscenity here is the bolt gun into your skull. Dear alligator you float bellyside up and are hoisted with chains. Dear alligator, you swim my floors, you hiss. Dear alligator, the cats of the neighborhood are watching you. Dear alligator, none of them trust you. Dear alligator, they will never step into your throat.

Alligator Poem #21

If we could find an alligator large enough
to fit inside
the size of a city
or a house
or even a car
we could live there forever
adrift in its heat
unchanging
within the moss and peat
of its leather.

Alligator Poem #20

You have known your city become a city of alligators. You have watched their shadows blacken your bedroom window. You have laid awake for their hissing and scratching along the boards and walls of your house. You have watched their yellow eyes glowing like a thousand, thousand stars marking the night.

Alligator Poem #19

now those blurs and black clots

the black and silver folds

light smeared and shattered

along dense and slow fields

what we cannot remember has been

older than those pockets housed

within minds

older than those bodies, than the oldest

of bodies gliding along black seas

those leather bodies older than all bodies

now those blurs smoldered

and puckered and clotted

and their images as if smeared

in dreams

now those blurs and bursts of light

flashed within minds older than all minds.

Alligator Poem #18

an alligator does not think,
an alligator knows,
there comes no end
no alligator dies
not even when it is dead.
stitched into boots
or coats
an alligator slung motionless
in flatbed trucks
and sold for luggage
an alligator infested and bleached
ribcage alongshore lines
continues from the beginning
and beyond the end.

Alligator Poem #17

to the child who wonders:
this alligator wanders
the forest inside you
as you carry its rank hissing
through all of your dreams.

Guest Alligator Poem #2: Post Nile Croc by Obed Sanchez

My thanks to Obed Sanchez for sending along this alligator poem (now a croc poem to retain some authenticity).

“If they could, they would eat themselves,”

a sneak attack, a shudder, primordial sounds issue forth

Spiky razors crushing bone like rubber

Now they’re everywhere

In the pool chlorine and urine

Mix with blood

The swampy stench

The slimy ooze on the sidewalks

Consuming themselves to satiation

“they feed as if on life itself”

With overfull bellies

Turning themselves inside out with desire.

Alligator Poem #16/Little Red

the girl with her hair the color of the burst sun. along the forest edge with white breaths and throbbing chest. she waits for wolves, dogs, strange hounds. their wicked tongues. their dripping lips.

she waits for what will not come.

those dogs who have howled their stench against her breast lie broken and red crunched and crippled in the forest. organ meat consumed. jaws of wild flies. lone dogs yet alive and yelping from within leather chambers.

instead she will know astonishment inside a humid mouth. she will find a wilderness of horror within ancient jaws. she will become a girl of redness strewn.

Alligator Poem #15/ The Ancient Mariner

bodies buried at sea
wrapped in tarpaulins
in cinders
and still they wash ashore
mottled with crabs, with sea lice,
laced with weeds
soon into the bellies
of alligators
from wherein no ghost voice
ever moans.

Alligator Poem #14/ Dear Alligator

Dear Alligator, I'm too young
to cut me open.

Dear Alligator, is that my mother
scrapping and singing in your hollows?

Dear Alligators, your eyes along
the dark waters of my ceiling.

Dear Alligator, be gentle

Dear Alligator, what will you find
but that I crunch easily?

Viny Poetry #3

As a writer who, more often than not lately, wishes he had some skill as a poet, I'm thrilled to have an excerpt from my upcoming novel The Alligators of Abraham up at the third issue of the always wonderful Vinyl Poetry. Makes me feel good to see my words amongst the words of so many great poets (and some pretty fine Grocery Lists, too). Much thanks to Katherine Sullivan for putting my words up there.

Alligator Poem #13/Hollywood Alligators

trained alligators are on television

hissing on white sheets

and devouring beds

while nearby women apply

moisturizer to their cracked skin.

trained alligators are on television

hissing poolside

and submerged in crisp blue waters

their eyes bloodshot

and their ancient minds crazed

for the chlorine fumes.