Charlotte stops by the cemetery every evening after work. Talks to statues of Christ and the Virgin Mary and some minor saints who lurk. And then one day, Saint Frances topples off the tomb of some bird lover and right onto her head. And now like everyone else there, she’s very, very dead. Charlotte’s found by some boy named Fred who’s jerking off beside a grave. He steals the glass eye from her head ‘cause that’s the kind of thing he likes to save. Five days pass, the cops show up; in their hands are cans of beer. "Who’s this dead cunt without an eye," they laugh , "and what’s she doing here?" And what’s she doing here? The coroner takes her apart to find out what went wrong. In her leg he finds an aneurysm that would have killed her before too long anyway. Charlotte’s taken to a crematorium in a city far, far away. It’s really not what she would have wanted but then again, she had no say. The boy named Fred becomes a man; he wears the glass eye around his neck. The cops use it to identify him when he’s burned up in a car wreck. Bye bye Charlotte. Bye bye Fred. "Bye bye, love. Bye bye, sweet caress. Hello emptiness, bye bye, my love, goodbye."

Oh my God, the dog vomited on the floor again. Oh my God, a bunch of his friends are at the door again. "Hello, Mr. Williams, is your dog at home? If not, I guess it proves we should have phoned first." They probably want something to eat, but I haven’t enough to feed the ones who came last week. Oh my God, the mice have eaten through the wire again. On top of everything else, I’ll probably die in a fire and then they’ll find me brown and hard in what used to be my yard. Just like the Dresden logs, they’ll tie me in a sack and give me as a gift to hungry dogs. Oh my God, the whole world’s dyin’ of cancer and such. Oh my God, I know you think that I complain too much. But it seems to me that some have been unjustly punished. And when there’s a job to be done, all you ever think to do is send your Son.

Hers was the kind of face you’ve never seen on celluloid—some called her "special", some called her "mongoloid". She lived in a shack where her fat old father tended her. He was a lousy human being, but one hell of a gardener. And with a note and some bills one fat old day he sent her to fetch some seeds and things at the lawn and garden center. Though she proved quite a laugh to the patrons who inspected her, her face raised the pulse of the boy behind the register. He, who was marked by his dark, psychotic loner looks, his was the kind of face you’ve always seen in porno books back on the pages with the pictures and addresses of America’s psychosexual messes. Anyway they made it on a bag of fertilizer. She experienced a pleasure that life normally denied her. She went home with a glow about her arms and face and hair, sweat on her brow and blood in her underwear. She lay on her bed feeling pretty but a little sore, smiling like an angel ‘til she heard the slamming of her door. "Where are my seeds?!" her fat old father asked her in an alcohol rage like some fire-breathing bastard. But she didn’t have the seeds and she didn’t have an alibis. "I forgot them," she said. She didn’t look him in the eye. So he hit her with his shovel, hit her with his hoe and spade. For her, it turned out to be a bad day anyway.

This is not what it might seem. Don’t be fooled by first impression. This ain’t really anything but an overworn expression. This could be what you might want if what you want is nothing better than what this is or claims to be, here it is and to the letter. This is not what it might seem, though what it seems is not much greater. But you can take it if you wish. Either way, talk to you later.

I was stillborn, but nobody noticed. They just thought I was a little slow. I was stillborn, but nobody told them, so they wrapped me up in swaddling clothes and gave me a name. I was stillborn, still I was part of the family (though they kept me in a room all alone). I was stillborn, which left me cold and clammy. And they never let me answer the phone or answer the door. I was stillborn, but mother still loved me. She prayed for me everyday. I was stillborn, and yeah they all loved me. But one day they had to throw me away because my cheeks fell off.

Candy painted portraits of celebrities by hand on velvet and though her Elvis looked more like Morey Amsterdam, the carnival crowd used to compliment her: her art wasn’t perfect but her blowjobs were. She is hot sometimes, she is cold sometimes, she’s like the weather and food. Blood bubble on lips, forms then pops, then drips: last belch of the fish. She was the front cunt punching bag for the local mayor who was a secret molester of teenage boys with long hair. One wild cocaine night with a pair of pliers he pulled her teeth out one by one. He did it real slowly. He did it just for fun. The quicker he crumbles the thicker she stumbles, "the bitch has started bleeding all over me." Blood bubble on lips, forms then pops, then drips: last belch of the fish. Candy put a Dylan tape into the tape machine. She filled the tub with hot water ‘cause she wanted to get clean. Lady Schick to her wrist, she was born into a dream. With a flick of a switch, she was born into a dream. Blood bubble on lips, forms then pops, then drips: last belch of the fish.

Sucking a pear in a pair of socks, always a bridesmaid never a corpse. A slice and a pop and mother shrugs another: a seventh Ceasarean. Children ponder dumptrucks, steam shovels. February’s buried thaw to rest. My love pries the wired jaws of a goat, and her spinach is mine. It is Spring and I have screens for the mausoleum windows. Shades of scar upon her arm that breathe beneath her dress. Her voice, a dull and dirty knife through newly pregnant flesh. The getaway hearse left a week ago, wash line pajamas still hang. Some kind of flag, those ghost clothes, grey and flannel. We imagine all those cats of hers tracking brain through the house like memories or dander. It was her brother-in-law who thought to call Stanley Steamer.

You weren’t there when they christened me and you won’t be there when they bury me, ’cause you sent me a "Dear John" letter on my first day of chemotherapy. And that’s why I’m no fun anymore. That’s why I’m no fun. Now two years ago, our baby choked on vomit and died with gurgling throes in sleep. The mortician polished her tiny forehead, but didn’t think to brush her teeth. And that’s why I’m no fun anymore. That’s why I’m no fun. I gather you want your dinner now; I had mine hours ago alone. With all the drunks that get killed on the road, why is it that you always make it home?

Morning drags and the pain will pass into boredom like your kidney stone. I phone your house with results from your post mortem, but you’re not at home. Oh, Laura, your eyes were a shallow grave and I came every night to die. "Jesus Christ, that’s tacky," she’d say. "You’re the reason that I’m blind." Mercifully she takes her husband’s head. There’s no danger in their bed. The man who burned her hair is dead. Sweet Vienna Carrion! She grins again to my chagrin. Vengeful eyes like big black balls knock down my disemboweling pins. I charm her in the kitchen, demonstrating my disease. She kicks, I kiss her soiled sole. She gloats while grating cheese.

"You’re far too good for this world," she would obsequiously purr. Yeah, I’m far too good for this world, but not good enough for her! And when I smile, she sticks her finger down her throat as if to gag. Funny, today we share a joke, tomorrow a body bag. And all the home boys in her block think I’m queer as a bat. Tomorrow I may not be so queer, they’ll all still be black! Oops, I spilled the Drano on the bunting of your shroud, love. I promise not to get it on the cunt that you’re so proud of.

Lay you down in sheets of satin, we’ll play a little game I call "Dorothy Stratton". I’m not really vicious, I’m just on the rag. I’m just a teddy bear in Gestapo drag. And in that light your eyes resemble faces in coffee table books in houses of Zion. "You were genuine, real," she says, "inside me". "You were genuine, real," she says, "inside me". And she fucks the vagina in my armpit with the penis growing out of her knee. And we eat olives and cheese on a veranda.

Mary Rose never left a letter, broke my heart and stole my sweater. You know it wasn’t right for her to back out of her half of our beautiful pact. So I martyred that archetype of faded whore gloom with a ballpeen hammer in a motel room. Elsa Hoff nearly had my baby ‘til a black skull coughed in her uteran gravy. Her voice is sad and its toxins tire, but it’s not as sad as an orphanage fire, for she promises nothing resembling love, but she cradles my head when I’m coughin’ up blood. Everyone who said they’d help you with your coping finally got tired of all your moping. Today you stabbed a cat to get a sense of the feel of steel in flesh. And with rancor and ardor to the doctor we rushed, while she softly complained that her hair wasn’t brushed.

"And any drooling pig with a six for a nose could talk that slut out of her clothes. Jew lover, you hover only slightly above the Jew himself. Jew blower, you know her, she’s a lot like a Jew but without the smell. I never thought I would condone the bloody piles of hair and bone, until I moved to the city."

(lyrics by Judith Schaechter)
Big fish eats the little fish except in a fairy tale world, where fish have fish tails topped with the heads of girls. But when the story’s over, the mermaid swims away, or else the little mermaid becomes a bigger mermaid’s prey. Sleeping beauty slumbers through the loudest sounds of life. She’s totally unmolested, she’ll be a totally perfect wife. Lying in her coma, with all her jewelry on, just waiting for the man who will rob her, take her home. And once upon a time, I was your sweetheart bride, but our love was so sorry, Cupid lay down and he cried. You were much older, but not a minute wiser. You let me take you to where the blind lead the blinder. And once upon a time, say the fairy tales of youth. Unhappily ever after is how they’ll end in truth. It’s the story of my life and it’s the ancient story of being uncertain of what you wished for when you thought you wished for love.

And she brags of her abortion like she can’t wait for the next one. By this time I realize she thinks that she’s Anne Sexton. She says I’m a misogynist honky, just like all the rest. But she’s only half right—I swear, I swear—by the hair of my mother’s dead black breast. On the morning when the virgin Spring murders the Winter, I’m usually sad. I go out and buy lumber for another wing on the Museum of Love Gone Bad. I stare at her from my awful bed clothes, the eunuch slave of a brothel on Lesbos. Take this stench from me, nativity of skulls. Take your stench from me, nativity of skulls. And she bought a scalper’s ticket for my last evisceration. The pain that played so sad, so real, proved only crude claymation. She’s an envelope of petals from a hundred dead forget-me knots and her heart breathes never syrup cough, a sheath of undistinguished bloody clots.

Now I got so many women, I often get confused. Which ones are vegetarians? Whose cats are whose? Which one works in a nursing home? Who has what disease? Life was so much simpler when I was lonely. Lonely, when I was lonely. Now the walls are closin’ in on my lovers and me. I’m lovin’ all of them, but they’re not lovin’ me. And I can’t escape this jury, in spite of all libation. Hell it hath no fury like a ritual castration. So frankly I don’t see the need for you to be telephoning. Go tell it to some other phony. You forfeit the privilege of intimacy. Go tell it to some other phony. You forfeit the privilege of intimacy.

Stephanie, I forgive you. Stephanie, I forgive you. And I really just wanna say I know you didn’t go out of your way to cause the pain that you did. Stephanie, I forgive you. Stephanie, I forgive you (how could I not?). ‘Cause only with your kiss could a boy—could a boy like this!—feel like a princess. But wasn’t there a pea beneath your mattress? Wasn’t there a pea beneath you mattress? And I know that you don’t miss me, but I don’t mind. Because I know the reason you don’t miss me is you’re so drunk all the time. With a bottle of B’n’B beneath your mattress. Stephanie, I forgive you. Stephanie, I release you. To a healthy, better life with better friends. To your hell of battered wives born in the bodies of men.

Sexual, she, in all the ways I’m not. My passion, an embarrassment waiting to happen. Shall I practice? Filthy mattress waits outside for copulation or sublimated patricide. Your love’s but a musket butt in the face. My blood grows cold in someone else’s body. Am I growing old? Or growing ovaries?

You call that thing a baby? Well, if I may be so bold, I’d say one day you simply shit out of the wrong hole. And this need to cut your throat is more duty than mere fun. For only the smell of blood will smother the smell of subhuman dung. And I’ll confess at the foot of the flame. My confession at the foot of the flame will fan it. One less one of you, one less one of you on the planet. And when ZOG and all its monkey men come a-gunnin’ for me, I will build myself a fortress of my Hitler biographies. And I’ll be there with my Schmeisser when the savages come. I can hear them in the street now, bangin’ the battle drum. But I’ll pick ‘em off one by one, though personal survival’s not my goal. You can kill the Aryan body, but you can’t kill the Aryan soul. Yeah, you can kill the Aryan body, but you’ll never kill the Aryan soul. Don’t think of us as cattle. White Man was born for battle.