Anna, What Fresh Hell Have You Brought Us?

We hated her.
Tommy, Corey, and me.
Our stomachs sank in unison when we saw her coming
a harmonic chord of utter despair
played in the key of oh-fuck-major.

During recess her obloquies bruised deep
raising goose eggs on our souls
that far outdid what rocks thrown by the boys
made on our foreheads.

“Hey smegmas!” she’d yell to us from the swingset
“you’d better come give me a push
or I’ll vomit in your lunch bags!”
So we’d go over to her
because we never got used to the taste of her digested breakfast
on our ham and cheese sandwiches.

Once during science class she took my fecund bean sprout
which I had carefully cultured with aerated earth in a Dixie cup
and left the room with it, only to return a few minutes later
with a perfectly pinched-off turd resting atop the soil.
But damn, if I didn’t have the second-largest harvest in class.

In gym she would aim the kickball right at Tommy’s new braces
and broke Corey’s front teeth during a game of tag.
In English her colloquy with me consisted primarily
of cleverly crafted insinuations that my balls hadn’t yet dropped
and would instead collapse in on themselves to form a vagina.
Decades later I finally comprehended what she’d said.

Her laughter was a demon’s backwash
burning our throats when we were thirstiest
and turning our guts into distilled anticipation.
Our breaths caught until the next encounter.
Putty in her hands
unable
and unwilling
to resist

--

The Anna in this piece is not the Anna McCambridge of Visual Fringe fame, one of our favoritest and frequentest customers. Not literally, anyway. But she did order this one, and I can definitely see the inspiration. See, Anna's motivations are different from most of the people who come to the booth: she likes to fuck with us. She likes to give us words like "obloquy" and "fecund" and "colloquy" and laugh when we sort through our beer-addled brains for the definitions. (This one was one of about half of the Anna gauntlets that we got all the words right. As we'll see in later posts, that wasn't always the case.)

Curiously, though, Anna's pretty loosey-goosey about titles. This one came from the greeting Paul gave her when she came strolling up with that shit-eating grin of hers.

Why We Adore Cindy

When it comes to beauty, sight only takes you so far
our eyes, though they can scan millions of wavelengths
perceive the slightest trace of a smile
see even in darkness
they still close when the light gets too bright
which is why they just don’t get her

The way angels strum a harp without moving
and tickle clouds with a heartbeat
flying through the heavens unaware of gravity

It’s harder for a fish to swim than this brown-eyed girl to move you
as though their gills are filled with jelly and every scale a broken rudder
her laugh, her grace, her genius tells a story
that none of the five senses can alone
cobble together to form the definition of beautiful

But even we don’t understand this
a puzzle of a woman that’s complete when left unsolved
like breathing the scent of a rose
and wondering what’s brushing our nose

--

Welcome back to another installation of the Poetry Vending Machine! This is Paul. Have a seat. A quick recap: earlier this month The Red Chair Project held their annual Red Chair Event, a sort of sampler platter of the arts things you can expect to see in the next year. As a treat to the hoity toity VIPs, some vending machiners were asked to come by and write poems for them, free of charge, during their drink and mingle session. And so we did. It was a surprisingly slow session, considering that the poems were free and that all someone had to do was fill out a slip of paper and they get a poem. Alas, the poems we did write turned out pretty well. Well, sort of.

This is the first one I wrote. Next year at Fringe I would like to put some sort of instruction on the slip saying something to the effect of "We do not know you or your family, your mistresses, your dogs, your unborn children, you mailmen - please talk to us about something universal that your loved one likes and have us write about that. Because if we try and write about them we could be dead wrong (and plain ol' boring)." So I tried to write about this wonderful woman named Cindy (and tried hard not to think of an ex by that name), given only the clues of angels, brown-eyed girl, and beautiful. Next time someone asks me to write about a loved one I'll describe how awesome it is to fuck the shit out of them and see what happens.

no title

Of all the things in the world
my one hope is this:
that we can say good-bye for a thousand years.
While the world curls in on itself
and ashes burst into vapor around us
we will be there
eye to eye
and lips to lips
the longing and tingling dread
of letting go
pulling us tighter together
like twin suns caught for a million moments in our diminishing gravities.
During the years you will not age
and we won’t sleep
because we only have a thousand years
and most people don’t get this lucky
so we have to make the most of it.
All around us there will be death –
you must prepare yourself for this –
but it will not touch us
tight in our cocoon,
fingers entwined in hair,
eyes shut,
breath caught
until each of the centuries,
like the ten digits in your hands,
have curled in, down to nothing.
And then I’ll say good-bye
only then.
Only when I am certain
that even the black holes in space
are aware
and envious
of our love.

--

Man would you look at the dust gathering on this place! It's like an archaeological dig all up in here! Because a broken laptop waits for no man, Paul is here to self-indulge some more with what is left of my copious Fringe booty.

So this one was requested by a guy who gave no title and four words instead of the customary three (unorthodox, but we at the Vending Machine, like Burger King, make everything to order): hope, longing, death, love. A little bleak, but I ran with it. Interesting side note to this - the dude showed up again with much the same instructions later on to another poet, and it turns out that he was gathering words for an art project. It's pretty damn cool of him to collaborate with local artists (even if they aren't aware). Kinda makes Orlando a little more artistically exciting, I say.

Live Laugh Love

Often the light plays tricks on your mind
especially when it’s gone.
Images form and rage,
your mind delighting in its revenge
for all the time you denied it today
left behind, like a pet, for more important things.
Even your ears join in the fight against you
tossing imaginary echoes off the wall
sounding the way mischievous elves would sound
if only they were there to help you.
But that’s the way it works,
gray matter against flesh
or the other way around.
Looking above fabric walls sporting thumbtacks,
outside windows pocked by dried dew
it’s obvious who started this fight,
Hatfields and McCoys
except less about pigs
but still about bringing home the bacon.
Fluorescence, neutral hues, keyboards that sound like dogs scratching.
Alone at night, when the sheets are relaxing
around you
and the silence consumes you
while memory plays a record that skips to the best part
an olive branch from an old friend
you smile
and know everything will be all right

--

Hey hey, it's Paul again! In the continuing saga of Tod's laptop of doom I am yet again pilfering my own treasure trove until I get some submissions from fellow 'machiners (and, as you may note, I'm down to the sand at the bottom of the trove). This one came from a surprising Vending Machine groupie. Surprising since she kind of appeared out of nowhere and that all the males in the booth fell in love (she was oh so generous with the beers). This poem represents one of the difficulties of custom-made art: when someone gives you the title "Live Laugh Love" and the words delight, mischievous, and consume, and you happen to be a cynical bastard of a poet, how exactly do you enter into their head and give them what they want? By being a better poet than me, it seems, since she came back and requested haikus from Tod and Butch using the same title.

Haikus as packing peanuts

Beauteous

She’s walking softly
in the reeds, parting for her.
A beauteous dance.

-

The mirror, she lies.
You think it’s a compliment.
Nope. Just adjectives.

--

A two-fer on the same subject! This one came about while Tod and I, starved for attention, tackled the same haiku theme for the same price. Two for one! It's like happy hour at the Vending Machine! And it makes excellent filler here until Tod's lappy gets mended.

The Essence of the View

This isn’t working
admit it.
Like an inside-out hula hoop.
It scrapes and cuts just when you get to the best part.
Not like it’s supposed to be at all.
It’s time to throw it away before there’s more bloodshed.
It’d be easier to blame Whammo
like with those moon-shoes that bounced backwards.
Which was kind of fun, really.
There’s gotta be merit to this ending, either way,
like staring in wonderment at a forest fire
smelling the charbroiled woodland creatures
yet knowing somewhere down the line it’ll all come back.
After a while.
Hopefully a long while for you.

After you’ve buried the hula hoop
or turned it into a trellis for lavenders
though you’re allergic to them
but tough – they’re pretty
once you’ve learned to walk outside
to the wreathed purple buds
and smell them deeply without choking
or thinking you’re going to die
maybe then you’ll find me on the other side.

By Paul

--

Bwa ha ha ha! With Tod's ol' lappy safely out of the picture, it is time once again for the Paul Show! All Paul all the time! Unfortunately it seems we have already posted my good poems, so now I'm down to the crappy half of the barrel. I would apologize, but I got paid for these, bitches! So no matter how crappy they are they were worth something to someone (exactly $4 - the cost of a beer)!

This one was requested to me during the big rain storm, and I would have delivered it on time but Dani had to go abscond with the laptop to protect it from the weather (a futile task, it turns out). My words were wonderment, lavender, and shoes. Yes, she was trying to stump me, and she came very close. I still have no idea what the title means (and I'm pretty sure she didn't either).

If anyone wants to email me their poems I'll conspire with Tod to get them put up here.

Florida Armadillos

The invasion begins at the first frost
the scraper can’t eat through.
Scampering into the backyard they burrow
under your skin.
Blood pressure medicine sales boom
The sun doesn’t shine as brightly
Cars crash, they go splat, and you can’t
help that sly smirk as you view the carnage.

Because it’s an invasion
and you can feel them in the crowd
watching French acrobats.
See their bloated husks in the waves at the beach.

Slowly taking over.
Crawling their way through town.
Until there’s no choice but to appease
them.
Dress up restaurants for
them.
Keep ads kid-friendly for
them.
Overuse. Overkill. Over and over.

So they can air-mail sweaters and
taxidermied gator heads back to the arctic.

A trinket from their brief stay
in their natural habitat.

by Paul

--

So, uh, hi there everybody! Tod's computer has finally succumbed to the days of sunshine, rain, and spilled beer from the Fringe, locking in with it most of the remaining poems. So to keep things moving I, Paul, am going to indulge in a little self-interest and post some poems of my own until Tod frees the remaining works from the bondage of a bitchy laptop.

This one came from a lady who seemed absolutely tickled by the prospect of a custom poem, but then, as almost all the mighty customers did, lost that tickle and became lip-suckingly frustrated by word choices. We really need to create a list of, like, 1,000 words to help them along next year. At any rate, my mark went all alliterative and gave me acrobats, air-mail, and arctic.

Hopefully Tod will be back soon, but until then I'll poop out about one poem a day of mine until I run out (or the other poets send me theirs so I can post 'em).

Sex

The sexiest instrument on the planet
besides the one in your pants, of course,
is the saxophone.
Before you can even think of playing
you have to lick it
make sure that reed is good and wet
suffused with moisture
until it’s straining against the clasps.
And then you blow
not your load
and not like you’re putting out a fire
not like your life depends on it
but gently, tenderly,
just enough to tickle
to cause a little tremble
and start a little treble.
The bars on the page
they’re breaking apart when you get going,
and the music is no long defined –
unlocked though you ignored the key.
Rhythm? Who the fuck needs that?
Now it’s down to syncopation and feeling
using your fingers to see the way
like Saul did when he changed his name to Paul
on his way to glory
though he may disagree with how intimate you are with that sax.
But who’s he to say what sexy is and will be
forever and ever?
And when you finish with the notes, exhausted
panting
you hit the valve, let the fluid drop the ground.
Spent.
Playing that thing, it’s music making love to you.
That’s glory, whether he likes it or not.


by Paul

--

Hee hee. Fair reader, I'm going to let you form a mental picture of the poetry transaction occurring here, given the title of the poem and the fact that Paul's custom words were "music," "sexy," and "Paul." So begins our boy's week-long summer job as a poetry gigolo.

Afternoon Delight (and prologue)

Well, here we are. A bit of background for anyone reading this who wasn't directly involved: during the 2008 Orlando Fringe, we did this. The results were just over 100 poems, written in about 20-25 minutes on average. We can therefore be forgiven for about 1/3 of them. Customers gave us the title as well as 3 words to be used anywhere in the poem. On most occassions, I wouldn't be able to tell you what those words were. It was confusing enough writing these things, much less keeping tabs on those little order forms. Next year, I'll bold the words like we were able to do in a minority of cases (let's hear it for Paul's relative sobriety.) On most of them though, it's your guess (or if you're author, feel free to leave a comment and tell me).

Anyway. If I have my druthers, they're all going up here. The good, the bad and the toilet paper. The subjects, as you might imagine from poems written at a theater festival, range from sex to love to money. Usually in that order. So let's start with the former, from the booth's own Barry White, Paul:

---

Afternoon Delight


Let me take you away from here
the way the wind is blowing through your clothes
makes me think about what I could be doing

Hands slipping on damp skin
fingers clutching hair
both long and short
legs rubbing in ways you usually buy toys for
breath rushing so fast that your voice turns to honey
sheets tossed away
box springs strained
just because we won’t escape gravity doesn’t mean we can’t try

The wet repetition of slap slap slapping skin
rhythmless, without time
maybe we’ll trick reality and fall out of it
existence marked only by the scratches on my back
saliva slicked in forbidden crevices
lips suffused with anticipation
hearts near explosion
but before they get the chance
we do

Sliding back into the world
finding ourselves on the floor
a ribbon wrapped around your wrist
the quick gasps that sound like laughter
you start feeling buttons from jeans pushing into you
and a chill from evaporating sweat
So sticky it’ll take several Q-tips to clean

And then I’ll grab some bread
with a grin on my face
and offer you a sandwich
It’s almost dinner time now
we’ll need fuel for later.