Arthur Graham > Recent Status Updates

Write as if your sexual organs are in flames,
until your fingers cramp, until your eyes
bleed, until you use the bathroom in your
pants, set fire to all your words, throw them
out the window, now you’re ready, proceed.

Ghost Dance warriors, united dead
and living, Sitting Bull knew how
to make war not love and love not war,
I feel a déjà vu annihilation coming.

“Do you realize what you
did? Do you remember?
Do you even care?”

The Night is Friendly

Tommy Keys pulled the black knit sailor’s cap over his ears and eyebrows, checking himself in the mirror. Frigid glacier blue eyes stared stonily from above a neatly trimmed mustache.

What color is the wind?
What color is an orgasm?
What color is death?
There is no sea of tranquility
There’s no such thing as a small miracle

“Sympathy For The Devil”
came on the radio, as I
burned rubber down Main

Like a banshee from hell
in a stolen car with a
Christmas tree tied on top

I wasn’t going anywhere
important, only to see my
shrink so she could tell me
something known by all.

A man enters the confessional and says to the priest, “Father, it has been one month since my last confession. I have had sex with Nookie Green every week for the last month.”
The priest tells the sinner, “You are forgiven. Go out and say three Hail Mary’s.”

That power of conviction is a hard thing for any writer to sustain, and especially so once he becomes conscious of it. Fitzgerald fell apart when the world no longer danced to his music; Faulkner's conviction faltered when he had to confront Twentieth Century Negroes instead of the black symbols in his books; and when Dos Passos tried to change his convictions he lost all his power.

Well, this is the longest letter I've written since I was in the Air Force and was sending love letters to a girl in Tallahassee. I don't expect you to be altogether happy with this one, but then the girl wasn't always happy with hers, either, and we both survived.

Never did put too much stock
in the planets and the stars,
crystals, tarot cards
and all that jazz.

My father died of Cancer.
His mother, my grandmother,
died of Cancer.

I will die of Cancer.

They suffered horrible deaths.
I will suffer a horrible death.
I’ve come to terms with this.

saffron sequins and a see-through dress, rogue tongues
of color licking the heavy
curves of her supple breasts; a fang of gold
flickering between them
as she wanders past the window.
behind her snow
is dazzling
and the people are frozen.
but in here there is fire and ghosts that are alive.

What am I going to do about the girl
from the wrong side of the tracks

There’s still some poetry to be mined here
despite what the years have taken.

you don’t hear the angels screaming
your name?

When the cold Andean dusk comes down on Cuzco, the waiters hurry to shut the Venetian blinds in the lounge of the big hotel in the middle of town. They do it because the Indians come up on the stone porch and stare at the people inside. It tends to make tourists uncomfortable, so the blinds are pulled. The tall, oak-paneled room immediately seems more cheerful.

Cello-mellow when Rainbow Yellow takes the cake,
and the recluse unpacks her violin,
while the widow keeps, on her hourglass, time.

I wear each shitty tattoo
like a badge of honor.

The black panther,
the pinup girl,
the red rose,
the pair of dice.

I still don’t regret
a single one of them.

That wouldn’t do
any good anyway.

Because regret is like ink—
it never goes away either.

I was out there on the crowded concrete floor of the Miami Beach Convention Center in August of 1972 when that howling mob of Republican delegates confirmed Richard Nixon's lust for another term in the White House with their constant, thunderous chant of "FOUR MORE YEARS! FOUR MORE YEARS! FOUR MORE YEARS!"

We came together here in New Orleans.
Our love was born here in New Orleans.
She is no longer here.
So I walk the streets; Pirate's Alley, Royal,
Frenchmen, Decatur
wishing we would have met
in a place such as
Albuquerque, Cedar Rapids or Sioux Falls—
places I have no desire to ever see again

Let her haunt those towns,
those bars, those restaurants,
those streets, those hearts

New Orleans has enough ghosts already.

This city spills champion bartenders
out from the Lower Ninth to Pigeontown,
Gentilly, Algiers to Mid-city,
the Lower Garden District to Central City,
Seventh Ward, Treme', Bywater
to the Irish Channel
and every corner in between.
And I love them too,
I truly do,
but Jaime regains the title
each inebriated visit.

I read poems by poet friends I admire
and order the same drink
while an ordinary evening
turns into poetry
or at least a short film
about the creative process
where I am either the star
or comic relief.

Dreams and desires
are made here
true love is pledged
with first kisses and last breaths
in the reflection of shiny beer taps.

Tiny Killer Hearts

Inside each of us
is a tiny killer heart
just waiting
for the right moment
to burst
into a thousand little assassins
and end it all
with a thousand tiny kisses.

To New Orleans and to you, who made these poems and my heart absolutely real.

Also, to the Quarter Rats, of which I am forever one.

For as long as he lives, Richard Nixon will be on the federal dole forever at $400,000 a year -- $60,000 pension, $96,000 to cover his personal staff salaries, $40,000 for travel, $21,000 to cover his telephone bills and $100,000 for "miscellaneous."

Nixon's entire political career -- and in fact his whole life -- is a gloomy monument to the notion that not even pure schizophrenia or malignant psychosis can prevent a determined loser from rising to the top of the heap in this strange society we have built for ourselves in the name of "democracy" and "free enterprise."

Despite all its menacing implications, the desperate plight of the national economy was not a story that called up the same kind of journalistic adrenaline that Washington and most of the country had been living on for so long that the prospect of giving it up caused a serious panic in the ranks of all the Watergate junkies who never even knew they were hooked until the cold turkey swooped into their closets.

The main reaction to Richard Nixon's passing -- especially among journalists who had been on the Deathwatch for two years -- was a wild and wordless orgasm of long-awaited relief that tailed off almost instantly to a dull, post-coital sort of depression that still endures.

Todd Cirillo at Horror Sleaze Trash