THE MEAT MURDERERS
By K. A. Shott
Copyright WriteShott.com 2007
Note: Due to differences in computers/servers/etc. the poems' physical appearance my vary from the original text as it will be found in the chapbook proper.
The Meat Murderers Index
-President Meat Man
-My Boy's Memorial Day
-Terminus
-Seeing Truth
-Divorce
-Accreditation of Authors for Children
-Emersion
-Founder and Fell
-Frozen Meat
-God in Mundane
-I Know Nothing
-Inextricability
-A Boy's Memorial: Watercolor
-Pounded Flesh
-Self Mutilation
-Memorial
-Shock Collar
-Some Things Can Not Be Forgiven--or Forgotten
-the day i changed in the Son's eyes
- Tongue Fight
-Waking the Dead
-War Bastard
-War Sestina
-Grinders of America United
President Meat Man
How can blood-of-mind fill cracked heads without killing?
Breaking eyes cry,
"But it's only three dead soldiers..."
Only three dead soldiers?
3 dead bodies!
3:
sonsdaughtershusbandswivesbrotherssistersfathersmothersgrandsonsgranddaughtersgrand
fathersgrandmothersunclesauntsfriendsgoodpeoplesaved souls?
It's only three. . . of how many?
Today we're at war.
a war after the last war
but before the next
where new boys and girls will lie face-down
on beaches; tides will wash them into dug-in shallow graves
and they'll share the sand with crabs and fleas.
Their metal rings, carbines, rifles & knives not-drawn, quietly rusting.
Will those next three be one of mine?
Will they be served up
for wars made of bologna
and peanut butter
in a world whose stomach prefers meals of what's been ground down
"No bones, please. No teeth. Pass the meat through the grinder again,
make it soft enough to eat," while we feed our children
to the Sausage-Maker who encases them in the uniforms of
--the intestines of--
3 dead soldiers lying on a beach. . .
. . . still, the crowd
salute the Master-Butcher
as he cages our children in bars on sleeves
and makes them stick their fingers out for him to see--
bones pressed right to their scalps--if their flesh is ready
to be fodder for his hungry machine.
My Boy's Memorial Day
A small boy's knee
folded to his chest.
Across-the-way: a newly-plowed cornfield.
He weeps, prays, head bowed over a square
of black wet soil and gray dry soil.
The marble reflects his father's name.
Yellow flowers,
like buttercups under his buttery chin,
sink where his feet sink.
Spring damp-grass leaves but miniscule depressions.
Still, he crouches.
Stalking his little mind for DeathHunter.
Hunting what had hunted his father
and his father's father
and him.
So he won't shake his mist from his tennis shoes.
He wears dew like a soldier in order
to inquire, of his mother...
why people have to die. His wings,
bars, knocks he earns standing, attentively,
watching his mother cry. Bootcamp-indoctrined-detainee
he's become an infant-man
so that when he draws sixty-four colored crayons into one dank mass
he understands its waxy smell...is the truth of dying.
Terminus
My vacuous head is brimmed. With cotton
fluffs adrift wind. Ache deep
Within my cavernous olive pitted eye. It screws
greening pulp into oil; dressing for brain-gray.
The bink-bink-bink of epoxy ball's--breaking wood
reduced sawdust: nothing survives. Tangerine
lollies stuck Kinder-Haar. Roots tear, tear, tear
from somewhere dark below. Pulsing follicle
bursting in mats brushed clean of symbiotic life. My vacuous head screams
to screams rising from my unborn children's...
I'm left a cavern (pitted prune mush) yet, with a touch, I'm blinking you
DanderPuff out from my pressed-board eye.
Seeing Truth
Eyes born through translucent truths--
shaded light dyed with brights.
Particulates quivering hands
tap tap tapping keys incessantly chattering
to vessels of eye that were borne through by
particles of dogwood wafting down-filled air,
like snow
wearing cotton candy canvas slippers,
yet floating like a ten-day old corpse--
rising from murk just to disappear
behind the sun's piercing arm. Still. . .
...DNA's never gone
the sun is not an armament
and dogs can gnaw doweled arms strung to hold
cells together--potted roasts--of
farmers, spouses, children
crying from eyes born through translucent truth.
Divorce
Vacant eyes--tableaux; an effigy carved womb-sac;
vision-swarmed--gaggle uncoiling--taciturn...
unspoken pact between her and the hunter. He,
who absconded life away, icon of Sturdy Oak
(legacy: two-men)
held eyes that quaked,
two egg yolks yelping escape
from cacao-tainted-keg-choice:
race or hacked life and her...merely maggot
or falcon.
Staring beyond her to the yew tree,
he gawped her neck's nape,
and quivered her blood. Talcumed
flesh she'd caked, supplicated
her icon of faith--powder
praying zinc could be his pupils
floating seas of oat
or Oboe whine
while psalm-balming quagmires
of time passing between
his expressionlessness,
his quacking lips,
his recitation of an effigy of their life
that could not be for naivety receding
--a tadpole's tail--as he waddled,
and she trembled,
while he walked to the visions of frogs,
and men,
and eyes
without her reflection upon them.
Accreditation of Authors for Children
Can their hands be so small as woodrats' and bats' claws
to their pinkynails? As pink earthworm newborns?
Venison-truth: freckled, loosed? Barnacles,
are they the measure of fit?
To funnel, tunnel our babies...
...babies tiny sausages tipped
with grimy nails wiping boogers
on their pictured pages. Babies beluga-eyes
swimming, fertile, ready & willing to be filled
with pictures. Of what--
...their digits seem too fragile
to turn book pages. Words,
entrusted to squash-brains,
crafted by hands
as large as paddles--as worn as
ships from mind-slips
--qualifications must one have to till our children's
Gray matter? Impartiality? Imperialism? Integrity?
what salt is added to egg-scrambled meat
and hashed into the potato-eyes of baby-feet
that might prefer pepper?Hassenpfeffer?
Vegan? Nothing?
Pedophiles can be pedantic.
Rapists: rhapsodizingwhilesodomizing. Bestiality lends itself pastoral scenery.
Psychopathology legitimizing, "If it's not chilling children aren't willing..."
to read?
--versions
of elephants
standing upon elephants
one must startle, shock, titillate!
one must penetrate,
thrusting deep,
into their Lil' Smoky minds;
Ordered To:
choose or find...
standing upon elephants of a world
gone mad when one must be backgrounded
...before serving up...
frenched fries
yet can write
in secrecy from scrutinizing eyes
images (lies?)
...what we feed our children.
Emersion
In a womb-warmed water I could not open
my eyes sealed shut, my ears filled up;
though I could breathe through the tip of my nose
my mouth remained. My knees--
bent cross--my ankles...little Buddha
in a too-small space. My toes curled askew
(no place to stretch) numbed
yet, I...comfortable. Muted--but for my beating
heart. Beating...something...
somewhere I could not know,
but it's cadence. A screaming!
Then, screeching stormed my warm-crevice
world leapt--gazelle-pulsed--
running, springing, beating until I could no longer
distinguish two beatings only one...pulsing...thrum.
So I screamed...but drowned
down the deep metal holes
where CopperFace's eyes winked, its coppernose
sniffed, its mouth's pointed tongue licked
until it had gulped my water-world.
I watched my nakedness
surrounded by blues/yellows/whites...
red so red it folded my purple into toes
and tonguegray.
I gasped! My breath knew I'd been born. I could hear men's voices,
machines...
and I was cold.
Founder and Fell
the leaves are turning,
dying right before my very eyes,
bled red faded into burnt oranges
transformed into overripe banana-peel yellow.
one is falling into a crowd
of boys-almost-turned men
who're turning limbs into blood-red eyes
and their baby-banana skin splitting
like overripe oranges falling to the ground.
bumper-crop of seedling finding ways
inside the silky folds of the Earth's crust.
Frozen Meat
in one stream of jetted ice
the night froze the wind
and howled the window glass.
Timbre, percussion--thin against the slumbering
corpses tucked tight in bed
where visions dreamed...filled heads...
shuttered out the Spirit-Ghost (dead but risen)
leaving the Christened--sleeping in
decrepit flesh, rankrotten and long forgotten
with frigid fingernails scraping their dirty nailbeds
deep within their sleeping heads: nothing can awaken dead flesh
except the Spirit's labour of us. Into our Father's hands,
exorcism of Vision's dream so out of the sand
and created past placental viles; though thrust
dead, blind, deaf
flailing through the wicked veil
where pain is preferred
to Him
and filth
to His touch:
Still...
The Spirit-Ghost is a basin,
His hands--Astringent;
He cleans us, binds us, loosens
grime: our foul-celled minds.
He eats away our cankers.
And where He touches it is fresh pink-clean.
It is dimply-sweet and we are...newborn.
Babies cradled, sleeping, flittering our black eyes hoping to gaze on, greater than the universe,
our Father's love.
God in Mundane
Dog is licking pink baby stomach-skin.
Boy is jumping frog legs from lily-Earth.
Man is working, horse-strong. Object.
Woman is birthing, bleeding, grieving life.
World is turning: mixing Margarita Blender.
Sky is crying ice.
Sun pumps up and down--libido.
Star-suns reach tinkle-fingers through toxic-dusts.
God is holding His turmoiled speck.
Believers praying.
Poseurs praying Lost not praying (at least to The Living God). Still:
the world is turning;
the dog is licking;
the man is working;
the woman is birthing;
and God's hands live in the core
of all universes where He holds our skulls,
bones of all time until the end of time,
as nothing but dustclods of dirtgrime
until He crushes us back to planetary soil so
Salvation can shed filth.
Risen, sitting with Him, and finally--listening.
I Know Nothing
I have nothing to prove to anyone: I exist.
I take up space and breathe.
I have no knowledge worth fighting for
--or against--my ears haven't steaks
to fork. I have no substance or human need
to feel. Right in a world-gone-wrong?
Corrections can't cover indelible ink--it bleeds through
making children squirming worms on hooks
praying grown-ups might learn truth
doesn't come from grammar.
There's no "gotten-right" to the correctly-flawed
seeded deep as pine! I see you now! Arborist!
Ozzy Wizard! I am not afraid of Curtains;
I embrace my tableau
rosa. It crushes Your spooked toes that "poof"
air, Magician's trick: trichinosis because
my nothing is everything.
My fleeting punctuation proves once a voice sung
for deafened cochlea with Word--clear as wheatrings--that clung
mercurial winds and blew a solar system right. . .tchüss.
Inextricability
Of human threads through patched canvas-
patched heads and hatchets,
shrapnel, dirt- infested
atoms from the genome
of all known
consciousness,
throughout all
time--latent
rhizome of transgenerational minds
rips peace of hearts
twined with metal,
sinew. Barbed/razor
wire holding
onto acts
of ax-murder, mass graves,
fear. . . fear. Fear's
locomotion on the rails
of our humanity being driven
between two lands, paradise and hell
with no chord to pull but the hammer of war,
shards barreling into our great-grandchildren's souls that will
yearn for reconciliation/forgiveness...RNA of decisions
long-ago made, yet haunting. . . still drenching with
blood-sweat,
blood-bought rains for crops foddered foul and stained
insides
of dyed memory unable to forget evil buried
as deep inside as a virus.
Mutating influenza--we jab needles
into our children in hope
of salvation
we can not
earn,
will never
deserve,
and must beg for
O
D
A Boy's Memorial: Watercolor
The pulp is wet to its fiber's fill
stretched until it can be pulled.
No more. To be fastened and glued
to the wood. Carved with wooded lead
an image of a boy beneath:
blue sky,
upon green field
beside stone gone gray over time
chiseled:
day
life
name...
the pulp tears itself
away from corners, base; even the sky tears
from tensions...perhaps clouds...of a world
warring. Potholes of lightdark texture
burst the cells of the boy's skull
because milling isn't plutonium
mining and tree rings meter life.
Pounded Flesh
He began big. Black. Draft with white
Blazing. Jagged socks. He kicked, bit
laid flatback his ears;
what a beautiful heavy head!
He used his hooves...jaws...
he knew he could scare me off but bravery grows
by water-days and he starved because I decided
to lie-in his manger-hay. I repulsed him.
But then I felt him nuzzle--
his acquiescence saddened for I knew flesh
succumbed pride only...I mistook need for acceptance
I touched his powerful neck
he clamped my inside-arm's soft skin
between his sweet smelling teeth--looking me straight:
eye-to-eye,
brownpain-to-brownpain
until I lay back.
Resuming, I watched pulsing dead grass pass
down his throat, his quiet gesticulation.
In our quiescence
I noticed down low his flank:
a weeping wound so old and torn it oozed
purpleblack. Understanding,
cradling my head in his manger, Death was feeding.
Self Mutilation
Fingers bleed the keys.
I could not stop ripping
tips, cuticles, nails.
I made soft flesh flay beside half-moons.
I let loose my canines.
Deeper. Tore until just before the bleed,
to the pink-tender sting-touch
and then I dug more.
I waited for the tiny-wet crimson droplets
to ooze from my crust-cracked self: magma
DNA erupting from a weakening core.
My tongue, stained scarlet, sucked all that came
from my deep: myself into me.
Sacrificial sponge-flesh
to searing/grinding molars
(my pillars of four decades' decay mended with asphalt)
live to bridge bud to blood
for they had to feed
or starve
or both.
Memorial
My head is full of prickles
I run my palm over points
sharply poking through my scalp;
they embed my cerebrum, cerebellum, cervical spine,
like punji stakes of a long-ago time,
penetrating...easily...ripping me to bleed because
I pull out--for fear--and too early and the tips
haven't been cut. The way back up to skinned
head possible only because my fingertips shred
identity. My ink prints are scars
of city streets of a city with no more guide than
smudged incremental time: wounds fresher than collagen: towers: yet-fallen
rubble and railed spiked metal teeth of a gaping mouth
gone wide and dumb from palmed
prickles and headspines.
Shock Collar
Cargo Van. Caged. Driven,
the dog watches through his bars
seeing only where he's been.
Traveling. From Primal the puppy whines
"escape." His quivered lips
will a self-cry against voltage
bound round his neck. It sizzle-crackles
singes back without care for what the beast speaks:
sadness, happiness, need...I exist.
Collars silence, yet
BARK, BARK, BARK!
("envision beyond moving away")
so the poor bastard braves...
...and braves
...and braves...
Some Things Can Not Be Forgiven.or Forgotten
Sun-spotted platypus painted on concrete
sidewalks poured in celebration of liberation
between colors, genders, and political affiliations
in a nation masticating fat off its people
that sizzles as it drips, drips, drips onto the spit.
a chemical-renditioned Donner Party.
industry ripping flesh from our brothers' and sisters'
limbs, marinating them in teratrogens,
a mangled barbeque of mutagenic DNA
to the tune of tingy bells,
--demanding service with a smile--
and the glut of corporate bellies filling with warm, salted meals.
the day i changed in the Son's eyes
i
could never give that shame. His eyes/
that day--cataclysm changed: Son ashamed.
i
could never hate myself better than His pupils/
scorn. Was I too:
short, fat, nothing.
You
forgot me (I thought); i hoped
You'd still see Your responsibilities but You shrugged
your shoulders as if i were
passersby/bag-lady/drunk/heroine addict/whore.
Was i nothing but an ovum You once needed?
I
left your shadow.
My anger froze shard-ice inside my hung-head.
So I lynched Your umbilical cord.
and...then...
I
crept a spider...or snake...or turtle to my never-again-home
where I chipped crisped salt flakes from my scaly skin.
I applied my Mother-face costume
in time for the 3 pm bus and scattered
rocksalt on the sidewalk to melt my child
who'd once, with moonbeam eyes and pudge-arms, snuggled
singing, "My Sunshine! The Son Shines!"
Our
innocence jihaded...Baal Bomber.
I
tried not crying while your yellow bus exhaled
you.
Tongue Fight
VenomVeins!
decay oozes taste buds wallowing in
cayenne-taint and crab rolls dipped with
hot sweet pepper! I'm overcome:
Tourette's syndrome?
I'm miming fucks! Shits! Fiery stank and mouth poison,
flame-thrown napalm on my jungle-home
where my monkey-family burns. My words
their Earthen-vessel
(once warm with honey-stick for them to gorge on)
has grown a woman
(formerly known as Mother)
Waking the Dead
Trapped inside the parlour's window a dragonfly buzzed.
"Neuropteran," I whispered.
My mother-in-law huffed, "What?"
"Nothing."
I never liked biological dissecting/ quadrisecting/ any-secting;
I loved life too much to cut it.
My husband said that was why he fell in love
with me that day we reached for the same book,
Welkin, in that bookstore.
The cover--a woman, enceinte--encircled with fleurs-de-lis.
"Semé," I said.
"Indeed," he replied, "Have you ever seen the Neva river?"
"No, have you?"
"No. But I've heard it's worth seeing..."
It was a beginning
much to his mother's chagrin.
I searched for bombazine,
but mourning isn't what it used to be.
I searched for Tormentil to make my own,
but I know nothing of dyeing...only dying...
I settled for cotton. Lapiz Lazule...
...only, blue funeral-wear felt queer,
Wyrd-like: like a rock dove for Orcus,
or calamus for Matuta
in lands-extinct...like Etruria. My husband...dead? Funny
how I remembered his life after
it ended...when? I'd forgotten
...or failed... he'd wanted to go to Europe,
to Angoumois for cognac;
to Calabria or Sicily for the thrill of being kidnapped.
He wanted a real Kreutzer and he wanted to touch a mace.
But his "reins" failed fast.
"Zaftig," our old-lady neighbor said.
She brought Kreplach to the wake.
His mother brought pickled smelt (claiming it his favorite) because she knew I hated it.
I never was close to his mother.
She was haute (her assets her insigne)
I: imbrued working class.
Dissonance underpinned the Dead's twenty-year marriage.
She'd brought a pre-recorded flute.
It tootled.
I'd wanted bagpipes.
He'd played bassoon in high school.
"Fermata," I thought, "My Beloved!"
and stared past the dragonfly
past the verdure
beyond wondering if
Oceania was as real as we'd dreamed.
He swore we'd go when we got enough
money, time off/sick leave.
I wondered.
"Does the screwworm thrive in Laogai? Perhaps it prefers the lepers on Molokai."
I wondered if Moloch still lived there eating children with his fiery tongue
and
if
their ashes
floated,
papyraceous, to the beach
and if ashes could wrest seaweed utricles
...and did he breathe... before he reached
the vault of Heaven.
War Bastard
Ireland, you beckon.
Iraq, I long for you.
Bangladesh, India, Polynesia,
Vietnam...why am I so drawn wander
wondering? Stereotypes/travelchannel/
wizened? I'll not find what I search in
land, people, mountains,
deserts, oceans, dead seas. I am
a nomad-mind; I won't see my fiction.
My heart's discontent valve-pumps lust
because I'm insane: I know what I know is a lie.
My mirror reflects columned Shermans,
Panzers, German Mother/Sudantanland,
Bohemia, Scandinavia: fathers selling Hitler:
I am the prodigy
wondering why no country feels home.
My heart--dead crushed mush; I pulse
with dust atoms wrenched from Earth
and my castle mere seasalt for
I am a bastard:
nameless, claimless, elemental Troy.
I beg of you: free me
from the egg sac,
the womb,
the semen from which I've been created.
War Sestina
Getting rid of bodies,
thousands of rotting bodies,
is difficult to do
without extreme measures
and a loss of soul
equaling the death toll.
This slaughter takes its toll.
It is an Everest-mountain of bodies
where soldiers run upon blood-covered military boot soles,
through rivers of not-dead-yet bodies.
Fortification the justification. A measure
of what we are called to do.
"What do we do..."
two freshly orphaned, bomb-deafened children.s cries toll
"...what do we do. . . what do we do..." while the soldier measures
rations of rice and bean. He keeps his mouth shut against the stench of rotting bodies.
thousands of bodies--
filled with shells that voided their souls.
"We're selling our immortal souls!"
the preacher cried, "What are you all prepared to do?"
"There are thousands of rotting bodies
poisoning the water. The children have to drink! Think on that!" He watches the tolls
drop into the offering plate; the parishioners attempt to save the church's body.
The preacher smiles believing he knows the standard by which he'll be measured.
MEASURE
SOUL?
BODIES
DO.
TOLL
the BODIES!
We are creating thousands and thousands of bodies!
Is death and rot the lot of our measure?
What price will we pay for the mounting death toll?
OUR SOULS
MUST UNDO
This barbaric creation of bodies.
I beg of you--look into your heart, your mind, your body and soul,
ask what measures we must take to stop Death's toll rise--there must be something we can do
to stop building this world out of bodies.
Grinders of America United
The most natural order,
it seems to me--if flesh is the fodder
upon which sin feeds--Anorexia is
a great spirituality. For if one starves Fleisch,
as Jesus and Buddha did, does one stop to live?
Perhaps mouths not stuffed up with shit-to-be
find voices, reasons, honesty--
maybe treason--but it's truth
instead of calories, conviction
instead of omega oil, searching
deeper meanings than can be found on food labels.
But then where does it leave the rest of us?
Pathetically stuffing tongues with whizzed food,
sugar-coated-potato-crusted Ragued-Gulash?
How fast do cells die in Gulag, Internment. . .
at what concentration must our glucose be
to keep motors running,
even if leaded?
Perhaps the Anorexics know
what only those "in the know" know:
food kills because
no one:
grows, butchers, gathers, prepares and
everyone:
drives-through,
boned-skinned-packed, preserved to last, frozen, 10 yrs,
don't care that plant's belts are non-discriminating--
they shovel:
fowl,
bovine,
canine,
equine--all down the same line?
--because clocks tick twenty-four hour shifts every shitty day.
Sunday,
do they run the pigs through?
--perhaps the anorexics too?
