Alex Lacey

i once met a man who stole meat

for a living:

flanks, tenderloins, prime rib-- you name it, he'd get it.  

his eyes sat low as his profile ...

he knew to avoid attention

staying out of eyeshot was key to his success and continuation.

in and out like a gust of wind

he tucked his pants into his tube-socks

sliding the meaty bounties down his pant legs

& got the hell out clean (most times)

sometimes, however, he was caught mid act

in fact he was jailed before because of it  

he stood steadfast though

out of necessity— making ends meet.

coolers of ice in the van

kept the contraband chilled.

door to door he'd sell the product

to neighborhoods impoverished

of blue collar works

to machinist

to the mouths of kids with colic

neighborhoods of privilege alike, of lawyers, bureaucrats, business owners.

meat is meat is meat to those who eat it.

2.

put a goddamn Rock through the Whitehouse’s windows!

that’s what i’ll do! i’ll tell ‘em this election was horseshit.

i’ll tell them the new leader ain’t our guy. “what you get is what you Get”

but what i got ain’t yet filled my cup to the brim, ain't given my drain the pleasure of such multi-textured bliss of hope spilling over onto the paved streets at the foot of the capitol.

these diplomats ain’t made one body better than before.

hasn’t made the whole body of the country well, no sir.

i’ll tell this drunk, the american belligerent, what i think about their demeanor, what i think about their attitude as of late-- how they’re bumming everyone out, but i compliment their mid-western drawl instead.  

3.

i’ve been breathing a little deeper, focusing on inhales and exhales more so than i ever have before. been basking in the golden hue of sunsets longer. been taking in the throw-away pleasures of this Existence. been curling my mustache like a deviant and praising the begotten population of a Nation.

my breathe intakes the goodness of their plenty.

my eyes chase light from beyond. my Heels jolt atop the gravel, my toes pry into the padding of my boot sole.

my existence pushes against the shadows.

my decency, or what is left of it, seeks candor in public places.

each breathe i pull in through my nasal

wanting life to make my Heart thump like the once when i ate LSD in a hilly park under a television-looking sky, with loads of static warping the image of a cathedral city gleaming in the angular rays of light!

i looked inside myself as another person and saw a sight i didn't like.    

seeing a lazy over-thinker, afraid of Death and what comes after.

see a confused sap in me, with not two thoughts to rub together, see me afraid of my neighbors wanting nothing to do with me!

see,

afraid to be a vicious continuation of dead generations wishes, like a lackey making their image come to fruition,

afraid of relishing in my ignorance and wishing for ignorance of my continuants,

see!

i am afraid of brushes with the bedsores,

afraid of mist never falling,

afraid of thieving patrons, with pistols in hands shaking the barrel in the face of petitioners,

afraid of my ticket getting punched too quickly,

afraid of all the bad teeth of the world wanting a piece of me!

afraid of vladimir putin and his henchmen,

afraid of famine and loads and loads and loads of diseases,

afraid of a man-baby playing the role of a leader, with his cock in hand, with fried-chicken residue on palms, with disunity in his blood stream! with fat and sugar gushing to headfirst to his stomach, with his heart beating to the rhythm of authority and a lack of love as the doughy prop that is his backbone,

afraid to deny the authority of diplomats with large muscled madmen, blindly doing their bidding,

afraid of whistling wind, gushing past thin walls— life fleeing past the windows view!

afraid to be a portion of a button mashing generation, stating grievances on websites, voicing opposition, addressing the enemy through memes, vlogs and forceful ideologies.

take me backwards to a dozen lifetimes ago when i was braver.

strengthen the falsehood that i was once a brave-boy, with a stomach free of gagging and a heart without palpitations,

afraid of the wounds of the whimpering, hairy mouths of back-alley cats getting no attention,

afraid of the destitute boy and his pet,    

afraid of milk saucers containing anti-freeze, getting gulped down by canine friends and thirsty jazz-master bums needing to wet their whistles,

afraid of loving someone else & not myself,    

afraid of neglecting the sky, the stars, the sky, the beyond the surface of the here!

1.

  America is drunk again. Piss drunk. Bellyache drunk. America is chucking glass bottles at all the feral cats that get in their way on the side streets. 

i heard America crying in an alleyway behind a dive bar in the district.

they were the drunkest i’d ever seen, drunk off imported drafts of barley wheat and barrel aged pinot.

America is drinking to forget. America is a sad drunk. sad because it looked into a puddle, saw a reflection and it didn't like the face that stared back.

i patted America on their back and left them curling, left them mauling on their bellyache. i heard America lost their compassion. someone told me they left it in a supermall way up in freezing Canada.

they left it in a church offering basket that is mishandled. they tied the tithe in with morals and didn't like the outcome.

i heard America crying atop a chiseled monument, below the shadow of some mythical mantra that no one understands.

i heard America belly laughing with a drink in hand. i heard America toe tapping in a dimly lit marketplace. i heard America was thirsty, overlooking the well water, realizing there isn't a drop to drink.

my dreams teach me of country & tell me of a drunk uncle at the table.

what does this drunk keep on muttering? 

i see a vision of America in the shape of a duo.

"champion the night!" said a poor boy to a feral cat. 

fog snatched the poor boy & a republican ate the pussycat.

America is a mansion without the roofing. it is a poor boy & a cat that never makes it to the ending of the story. America is a hat made in China.

America is a poet behind a garbage pail, waiting for a poetic line to come to mind, a fighter never greater than the enemy it always needs, a tenacious drunk needing another pour, needing another feast before the freeze, a pantry of food set aside a few before the famine comes and depletes.

i heard America way out in Alaska shouting at the cold country.

i heard America at the barring strait.

i heard America is a cheap date that only talks about cured meat and fucking.

i heard America can't get it up because of medication.

i heard America tried to meditate under an apple tree for 6 seconds.

i heard America overthought the moment, made a mountain from a crumb, made a poor boy into mist, made a feral cat into lunch meat, made me want to help out the drunkard in the alley, whom shifted through the drain....speaking to the wind.

You fell for the colorful covers

headfirst toward each alluring book sleeve

image over substance was the motto

you hid between the aisles and licked portions of content

clean

and felt whole between the public paper

scanned fact and fiction

with eyeballs

browsing through dusty pages of the library

until your feet throbbed in those sneakers

it was an ethereal event

you crossed over to another dimension

when you focused closely on the buzzing from the light fixtures

you bent the mind over and gave it a flogging

checked out some issues of Scientific Journals

that you can’t yet pronounce

accrued some late-fees

never paid back the debtor

the day Bettie Lou died a hundred some-odd ladybugs covered my windowsill

the bugs clicked and crawled across the universe of my mouth and backbone the south is the place where Bettie Lou lived & where she slipped away into infinite space her chest empty of a pulse without a breathe she’d only just let go only just spoke her last goodnight

and where is the soul when it leaves the body? does it become the pulse of a rainstorm, of a ladybug, of a backache?

a person lost is a projected sound that doesn’t echo back to the source

One time, with bastard brown eyes, I viewed a smokey alleyway in Beijing, China. I was lead throughout the capital city by a headmaster named Mei. She taught us how to prepare dumplings, I couldn’t get the form up to standard. I was attending a english speaking school seven hundreds some-odd miles from the chasm of cooking cockroaches, sizzling scorpions; bugs and insects alike were atop open flames, succored through by wooden kabobs. It was an assortment of cheaply made tourist teeshirts of Mao Tse-Tung and the fat vision of Buddha hung on necklaces. Lo Mein noodles heated and swirled in warped wok pans as my group wandered a foreign city.

One time, years ago, I visited the Great Wall of China.

The spine of the wall crawled over the desolate landscape. I ate french fries at a Kentucky Fried Chicken in the shadow of the ancient fortification. The history of the Ming Dynasty is now adjacent to an American fast food chain. My knees shook under the thin fabric of my jeans.The joints of my arms were wrapped around my body, shaking from the cutting wind that gushed from the mountain range.

It was the longest I’d been away from home, and the hotels where we stayed, whether in Dengfeng or Xian, all seemed haunted, maybe by ghosts from the fallen dynasty where franchise chicken is served on atop forgotten slave graves. Mei told me she’d never eaten KFC’s food before. I promised her she wasn’t missing out as I stuffed my mouth full of fried potatoes.

Once during the trip, I saw a man with no legs crawling with both hands on a sheet of cardboard. Business-folk and children and I walked around the glaring sight in the cramped city center. The legless man waded in trash and dirt as we walked from the marketplace to the school that took space in a six-story government building walkup.

When Dengfeng came into our vision, I felt braindead. The hotel we stayed in near the Shaolin Monastery was only partly illuminated. Half of the building was closed off from lack of occupancy. I was awoken from the violent hissing wind. In the middle of the first night we stayed, someone kept trying to get in my room, the doorknob kept turning like my stomach.

Shaolin Temple is the birthplace of Kung Fu. The temple is divided into different sections of training. The bell tower and the various stone structures are shaded at the basin of the Song Mountains. Monks, both boys and men, flipped and bent in red suits. One monk shattered a sheet of glass with a needle. A few monks flipped from tabletops.