The Legend of Spaz Humperdink, Duck Gynecologist

Anyone who has never been to
that porn studio on Old Dirty MacDonald’s Farm
is a depraved degenerate.
The walk alone brings you closer to God,
especially when you can see his beard floating in the cerulean sky
right above the bright red barn
sitting on the horizon for what seems like an eternal march
through pristine wheat fields whispering Heartland of ‘Merica the whole way.

Suddenly you’re opening the barn doors and Dirty Mac, as he’s known,
is inviting you up to the loft
to watch the spectacle unfold below.
Rock Schlonger or Grover Niptwist preps over on a bale of crackling straw.

And someone lubes up the duck.

Spaz never does that. Spaz stays out of the production, sitting back in his white coat and wide hat under the shade of imported gorse outside.

The scene begins with some banal role playing.
“So,” says Rock. “What brings you here?”
“Quack,” says the duck.

The duck never seems confused once the action picks up.
It seems horrified. It flaps and slaps its webbed toes against the actor’s thighs.
But it knows what’s happening.

Spaz waits until he hears Dirty Mac yell cut.
Then he strides in, casual as you please, still blowing steam off his coffee.
He whispers to the duck for a moment, tells it that it’s beautiful. Tells it that it’s still wanted. Tells it that it’s loved.

Then he checks. “Nope,” he says, “she’s fine.”
See, a female duck who so hates her mate can alter the path of her fallopian tubes, keeping the sperm in a permanent maze. And Spaz could tell if she had done it.

She did it. Every time.

Still, totally worth the five buck admission.

--

Oh, how I love the play this poem got. I remember the couple who ordered it well: cute, youngish, dapper, the type of folks I would have pegged for inspiration culled out of some Conor Oberst song. Sure enough, the girl provided the mandated words for the poem - "cerulean," "spectacle," and "gorse" (it's some kind of shrubbery).

And then her boyfriend writes this title to go with it. Was he pissed at her? Was he just one-upping her? I'll never know. Trevor Fraser wrote this, because ... well, if you know Trevor, how could you NOT give this to him? He proceeded to memorize and read it at the Poetry Smackdown the following night, to equal helpings of laughter and controversy. I always seem to think the Fringe celebrity judges will have a weirder sense of humor than we do, but Jameson Beane in particular was straight-up horrified by this poem. (Though to be fair, the version Trevor read that night specifically mentioned the duck being raped.)

Me, I found it educational and, um, edifying. According to Trevor, the thing about the fallopian tubes is totally a real fact.

Intermission

No poems here, kids. The Vending Machine - which is to say, the laptop that has the poems - is undergoing some maintainance, so I'll be posting a bit less until it's ship-shape again. I still have a few in my pocket (thanks, Curtis!) so I'll be putting those up sharpish. For the time being, you may check this site every other waking moment instead of the constant basis you have grown accustomed to.

While I'm here, though, I'd like to invite y'all to the Orlando Museum of Art for their First Thursday soiree on July 3. Vending Machinists Trevor Fraser, Jesse Ross and Tod Caviness will be painting the air all sorts of purty colors, reading surrealist poetry in conjunction with the "Surrealists' Holiday" theme. Poke your nose into the auditorium at 6:45 and 7:45 pm that night and say howdy.

She Drank, She Did

From me, no less.
     My cup
Special as she was
     Shinier than the beach bum
         flotsam and former
         stripper pole flagellators
     who fling themselves against me.
Shinier even without
     her clout;
Without the man and diamonds
     draped along her chest.
She pressed
     into wet sand
Man pressed her harder
     And her outstretched hand
     dipped into my tide.
Brought brine to her lips.
“You shouldn’t do that,” he cautioned.
She laughed;
     flicked some in his face.
He tried not to wince,
     tried to part her legs.
“We can’t,” she cautioned, “we need a contrapasto.”
He felt in his pocket
     she laughed again.
He sank into her
     the way she sank into my shore,
         the man who said, “Jewelry’s a tough business,”
         when she said
     she was all about zymurgy.
She put her lips directly to the waves,
     sucked in like a child with chocolate milk.
That’s when he walked away.
Maybe he could have helped,
    but somewhere he remembered
         John the Baptist came neither eating or drinking and they said
         he had a demon;
         The Son of Man came both eating and drinking, and they said
            “Look, a wine bibber and a glutton.
            A friend of sinners.”


by Trevor

--

With custom words like contrapasto and zymurgy, you know this had to be one we did for Anna McCambridge. I think this may have been the first one, in fact.

We had some discussions on cheating strategies as a result of these poems; what to do if you had absolutely no idea what the definition of a word was. I think I decided that I would try and work a game of Scrabble into the poem somehow, but I don't think I ever got completely stumped. Unless you count "effluvium," where I was totally sure I knew it and was wrong but got it halfway right in context.

Great, now this commentary's not even making sense. Anna, you're downright contagious.

Group Orgasms

Who’s looking for a good time?
C’mon! Every bathroom stall knows you’re out there.
Something better than the beach.
    Sun and surf
    and fun and turf
    and a Frisbee hanging from your fucking dog’s mouth
That shit’s for posters
    that we spread on the bathroom tiles
    to scoop up the scat
    for a little game we’ve come to call Sanchez’s Catapult.
To even start enjoying the monotony of monotony in this joint
      you need at least a sucking neck wound
SUCKING being an operative word
And OPERATIVE describing the nature of what midgets do to our anuses.

It’s what you’ve been waiting for, Good-Time Fan.

The non-stop hedonistic, pedophilic, necromanic, pyrosyphilitic, agropsychotic, castratitastic, abortive, bestial, infant cum-swap you’ve fallen to your knees and begged your two-ton Indo-French mistress to let you get off on.

We do it with more oil than a mechanic.
We do it on more grass than Brazil’s dead soccer teams.
More jet fuel than the Twin Towers.
More rust than your mother’s ass and more blood… than your mother’s ass.

You’ve never lived until a priest has attached a lamprey to your balls.
And the bite marks spurt onto his collar.
    And he laughs.
    And so does the Pope.
    ‘Cause he’s there too.

No fee or ID.
No pussy to penis to power ratio here.
Just enter.

Seriously, you trust me?
That’s sick.


by Trevor

--

Trevor actually managed to visibly offend the nice gay couple that wanted this poem, despite the fact that they provided us the title and custom words like "cum-swap". The Poetry Vending Machine: Imaginations Enhanced, Expectations Exceeded.

The Magnificently Green Piece of Bubblegum

Smoke billows out the door
Like Jimmy Cliff’s entry to the Twilight Zone
One of those episodes where a nice old man wins the lottery
Inhale and the phantasmagoria comes on instantly
But this is far from the Caribbean’s tropical clime
Cold as hell in fact
Definitely not Jamaica
The bar’s name is Russian
And the girl behind the counter is a Swede
And huge guy Ukranian
Spaniard stares
Even the fondue of America doesn’t melt like this

Glassy-eyed
Virginal in these transactions
I just hold out my hand
And the Swede places
So gently
In my palm
A plant the feel of which I’ve never known
Soft, and I cup it like an ass
Aroma of purest memory
Threatens to rob me of mine

But the color… the… neon color
Chlorophyll never glowed like this
And before I commit the sin of loading it into the bowl
She stops me; “No, no.
You chew it.”
So I chew it.
Wash it down with a creamsicle.

You can’t know what happens next.
Here it’s against the fucking law.


by Trevor

--

Trevor's first go at the booth. Memories are a little fuzzy that far back, but I seem to recall that he kinda threw them with this one. Me, I don't know how you give us a title like this (and words like "creamsicle") and NOT expect to get back a surrealist drug manifesto.