Somehow I feel the bleeder, and so I soak myself in disrepair
This is the American genius, and I can tell her now softly that I magazined my way to France for Hershey was wiling away in his factory creating chocolate bars
But before I could soften my way to the most brazen image of the Arc de Triomphe I recognized the image of Melkizador in the soap room cleaning his ass of the brigande who fucked him the night before
This magistrate up my ass, I am puking in the sink, disrepair
When I come back from Maine I have to live harder to the dollar and remember that I am not rich, not a Rockefeller, so no more money to the swine
There are many ways to sex it up – give the foster children to the ocean, every single one, and that is enough of a sacrifice for the turnip and the radish
Give one more hangover a sedative and let them know that I don’t care about rosary beads! I don’t care about the swivel chair in her office and how slowly it reclines!!
Everyone has an emergency voice that they use to announce the figments they see when no one else is looking
Everyone has a remote control voice that they use to turn the channel on the dust bunnies so the record they’re listening to sounds more like a motorcycle motor revved up
Everyone has truth in the voice when they face an emergency, like when the firefighters are forced to come because there’s a big big fire & they can’t seem to put it out
But Joseph Konrad in fishtown choked on the smoke fumes and deathed up the Grinch chord under his motor honey
Everyone has the death voice that they use when they are talking to the radio producers, because they can’t use their own natural voices, for then they would die laughing, and that wouldn’t be tasteful
Everyone has a motor city voice that they use in Detroit garages making the most sanctified ford mufflers that will eventually fall off all cars and onto the highway and then they have to use their help me voices
Everyone has a surgical voice they use when pulling their own heart out of the chests of gophers, because gophers have human hearts, that’s off the record
Everyone has a plastic voice that sounds like the noise of pasta makers in bar harbor restaurants when the mafia owned the kitchens and in cigarette scratched voices they would shout to the bartenders that they need to slice the lemons more quickly
Everyone has perfumed voices that they use to smell nicely words
But Johnny has a seed voice, he spreads his apples over the highways in Ohio and now they’re all sprouting, the apple trees, and it’s so hard to pick them
And Jonathan has a cucumber voice and I can’t hear it for it’s the voice of vegetable, like Johnny with his gun after the first world war saying kill me, kill me
And Debrah has a laughing goat voice because she’s a Capricorn and she can see her own zodiac reflection in the astrological map of the world
And Jennifer has a fiber voice, it sounds like the crunch of cereal soaked in milk, but not so much milk that the room needs redressing because the walls are the color of bleeding yellow construction paper
Debrah Morkun’s first full length book of poetry, Projection Machine, was published by BlazeVox Books in April 2010. Some of her poetry has been published in Moria, Parcel, Bardic Sepulchral, Venereal Kittens, and other journals. She is very active in the Philadelphia poetry scene and started The New Philadelphia Poets, a group committed to expanding the spaces for poetry in Philadelphia, in October 2007.