The almost Fall…Fall anthology…Fall of the press for now culminates in our final (for now) fall anthology GUNS GODS GLORY & GREED encompassing both the western pulp HONKY-TONK ANGELS and the cultish ANIMAL MASKS
No we’re not cowboys but we are going off in the sunset a bit to interact with the rest of the animals in the human zoo to retool for the better…remove our bodies and minds from cages and let rest of the empathetic animals out.
Like 2021’s year-end anthology CHILDHOOD’S END which contained the themes TWILIGHT OF THE SUPERHUMANS and WAITING FOR LUCY examining superheroes and what happened to a certain peanut gang gallery after they grew up… this anthology encompasses both the pulpy western concept HONK-TONK ANGELS which is organized like a pulp/silver age comic with exciting art and satiric ads along with the cult flavored ANIMAL MASKS not only featuring all sorts of cultish antics of the animal variety but political animals as well leading to the great unraveling of society into a more primal world.
Which kind of builds off of our last two anthologies BEDROOM ANATOMY LESSONS and one of my favorite releases WORLD ON FIRE: PROPAGANDIE which threw everything at you from war in Ukraine to ecological disasters, pandemic bullshit along with just good old fashioned nuclear destruction and totalitarianism. The source being political propaganda…so how did we get there in the west which let’s be honest has dominated world affairs for quite some time?
Well, HONKY-TONK ANGELS gives you more bang for your buck looking at that rugged individualism somehow seeking salvation as the human masks come off in ANIMALS MASKS to reveal the beasts inside incapable of finding salvation, so they have to damn whatever they may to establish some wayward path to redemption to damage control what could be construed as sanity in a mad, mad world.
So grab yourself a bottle (glass is optional), get your six-shooter, a bible of sorts (don’t care the affiliation) and get down on your knees for forgiveness…god don’t forgive…it lacks the emotional intelligence manufactured by humankind (emotional intelligence or god?).
Pray/prey and find out.
THAT’S NOT ALL, WE ALSO HAVE THE CHEAPER BLACK AND WHITE VERSION!
PREVIEWS:
Jesse on the Pool Table
Outlaw by trade,
a live Wanted poster
is what I call Jesse
who’s the kind
of gender that
crosses lines.
She’s femme
enough that men
find ways to crawl
past the women
who got there first
between thirst and want,
who write her poems
signed with phone
numbers and lipstick.
Jesse tells me
she loves them all,
but gets bored too quickly.
Tending bar, she asks
what I love about her.
I lie and say not one thing.
Her black lingerie top
and tiny denim shorts
scale the green felt
as I shoot her on
the pool table
While my camera burns hot
photographs
that steal the moment
for the pawnshop of time
that robs us blind,
but in different ways
we can both still ignore.
The Last Cowboy’s Wide Lasso
With so few days left,
he no longer looked
into the future.
Nor that what he saw
scared him but it was
the multiplication
of reminders of failures
he hadn’t been reckless
enough to ride.
To lasso with a rope
the bosses and big shots
to the back of the line.
To emerge from the
stampede with the girl
he wanted but never found.
To spur the young bulls
in need of an ass kicking
and then riding away
into the sunset now
approaching with
dark ominous tones.
Then, he laughs, saying
Well, I was never was much
of a cowboy anyway.
Rp. Verlaine
Eugenia “La Cuerva” Negroni, Mexico DF 1971—-Huntsville, TX (Present)
For Miranda Ramirez
Eugenia boasted two characteristics which seemed to set her apart or, as she saw it, well above any other Cowboy or Outlaw Poet. Firstly, she was a woman. And not just any woman. She rode daily, her skills in the saddle a match for any man. She drank tequila straight and smoked cigars made of black tobacco. She made love to men and women alike and dressed in full Mariachi garb, even if she only meant to walk to the corner store to fetch a pack of smokes.
In other words, Eugenia could be described as having been particularly flamboyant, resistant to the status quo, stubborn, original, and always the sharpest voice in the room. Eugenia strutted like some amazing peacock whose feathers, once fully fanned open, could dazzle anyone she wanted. And, of course, there are those rumors about her uncle, the Brujo from Durango, or maybe Tamaulipas, who can remember now? Rumors that he worked his Brujo magic and filled her with visions after drinking the sacred tea he’d become known for. He never shared the ingredients with anyone, but soon visions would appear, strange and magical as a painting by Remedios Varo y Leanora Carrington.
Born in Coyoacan, Eugenia began her life as a beggar, pickpocket, and thief. Her father, Diego, worked as a clown at traffic stop lights. He rode a unicycle and smoked cigars.
Sometimes, not often, but only when times were very desperate and food was short, he’d spit fire at the stoplights near Chapultepec Park. That’s how he’d gotten his start in “showbiz,” as he liked to call it, la farandula, by rolling on sanded glass he’d lay on a dirty rag, his bare chest occasionally nicked and running red with drops of his dark, dusty blood from where the glass hadn’t been quite well sanded enough. Then he ran the fire up and down his dark belly, streaked with ash, juggling flaming torches, teasing blue tongues of flame against his own skin in a dance that seemed to embody the masochistic, hermaphroditic potency of Mexico, like some Aztec God that both was and wasn’t. Her father worked every day and with the passing of each a little less of himself was left. Mexico is a third-spirit city. A surrealist city. Dali called it: “The Surrealist capital of the world.” Frida Kahlo, most important to Eugenia, was from there. And the aforementioned Remedios Varo and Leonora Carrington, but also Chavela Vargas (on whom Eugenia modeled her style. She remained a lifelong fan of Chavela), and all her sisters, all Mexicanas, even those who may not originally have been born there.
“In the great words of Chavela Vargas,” Eugenia liked to repeat, “we Mexicans are born wherever the fuck we feel like being born.”
But that came many years later, in a different life.
Back then all that existed to Eugenia was her father and fear. Both were brought to their most violent pitch when her Papa developed an ever-worsening cough that frightened Eugenia and kept her awake at night. She’d lay awake, one hand on her father’s chest. Rising. Falling. Breathing in. Breathing out. Wheezing and coughing. Sometimes he’d stop breathing altogether and Eugenia would shake him awake shouting, “Papa!”
“Estoy bien mija,” he’d say smiling. “Go back to sleep.”
Everyone knew the fire-eaters died young.
Eugenia adored her father, though she knew he wasn’t and would never be like other fathers. What he lacked in structure and economic security he made up for in affection, excitement, and attention. They were always on the move, always performing. Years later Eugenia would see the American film Paper Moon by Peter Bogdanovich and it would make her weep in remembrance of her poor father.
The older she got, the more parts she played in the acts. Sometimes she dressed as a clown herself with two balloons stuffed in her pants and her thin little face painted white and red with two red circles on her cheeks. The balloons of course were meant to give the impression to people in traffic (who didn’t really have a choice in whether or not they wanted to see this spectacle performed. Most gave money just to be done with it, out of sheer impatience) that she had an enormous butt. Her father would cycle around traffic on his unicycle in wild figure eights while Eugenia stood in the center beneath the traffic light, shaking her big balloon-butt furiously.
After that they moved to Chapultepec park. He’d pick a spot and begin juggling. By then Eugenia had taken off her makeup and little clown’s suit. She just looked like any other Mexico City street urchin.
While her father performed, Eugenia went walking amongst the crowd, hat outstretched (while the other carefully snatched a wallet or two) collecting coins while her father turned from juggling, to balloons, fashioning each into fantastic animals: griffins, ligers, pheasants, and coiled boa constrictors.
One day her Papa began shivering and sweating profusely. She wiped and wiped at his beaded forehead with rags. At that time they’d saved enough to afford a small, one-bedroom in Ciudad Neza. A hovel, really, little more than a concrete box without running water or gas. But it meant something to her that they finally had some kind of a roof over their heads.
It’s there that he died, on a thin mattress set on the floor, the only piece of furniture other than a kerosene lamp and an ashtray. Eugenia left him there, unable to deal with his body (a choice that’s haunted her ever since, a reoccurring scene she returns to in both her later poetry and early prose, culminating in some of her finest work).
It’s a miracle she made it out of that dark maze alive. It’s a miracle when anyone does.
Eugenia left on foot. Of the six hour journey across Mexico City she remembers next to nothing.
She had a phone number. Her father had instructed her to call this number only if anything ever happened to him.
“Toma mija,” he said, his breath a blast from a furnace. “This number will save you if some day I’m gone.”
He began coughing. Wracked by coughs that moved up and down his body like seizures.
This occurred just a few before he died.
It took Eugenia several more days to work up the courage to make that call.
In the meantime she worked the parks on her own, applying her thick, white clown makeup herself and shaking her balloon butt under the traffic light alone. She’d never felt so lost before, an immense empty feeling like an intricate cave system had been hollowed out in her chest. Paradoxical because, of course it’s impossible for a cave of any size to be in anyone’s chest for one thing, and for another, these caves felt absolutely enormous and vast. Endless, honeycombed caves echoing with emptiness. She felt herself continue to descend, tumbling deeper into the abyss of her own grief.
“Hello?” asked a voice on the other end of the phone. An older woman. Completely unfamiliar. Eugenia found herself unable to speak.
“H-hello?” Eugenia asked. The public phone crackled. “Mama?”
“Who is this?” the voice asked again , suddenly serious, suddenly stern.
“It’s Eugenia, mama.”
“Dios mio,” the voice on the phone spoke after a long pause in which the hissing and crackling of the phone line seemed to Eugenia like the cackling of invisible demons. Then her mother burst into tears.
“Can it be?” the voice sobbed. “Mi hija, returned to me? I thought I’d lost you forever when…that mad fool father of yours took you away. I searched the streets for years…never sure if one of those little painted clowns at the stoplights was you.”
Eugenia’s mother sobbed and sobbed. The phone card only had a few more minutes left and there wasn’t enough time. Outside the phone booth it began to rain.
“If you ever came by Chapultepec,” Eugenia said, laughing, though she didn’t find it funny and never had, “you would have seen daddy and me doing our tricks. I would dress with balloons in my butt.”
“Yes…well, where is your papa now?”
“Papa is dead,” Eugenia said into the phone.
“I knew,” her mother sighed. “From the moment I realized who you were I knew he must be dead.”
Eugenia wept then and laughed for a long time on her own inside the phone booth, so happy to have someone and yet still so full to the brim with mourning that the two emotions intertwined and became one, a kind of grief-joy that swept through her like an angry wind. Then she noticed the phone booth smelled of human urine and feces so she stepped out into the cool, clean rain. Great waves of relief flowed through her, crashed and sprayed against the caverns in her chest, beginning to fill some of the emptiness with something cool and still that rose up through her, combating the hollowness. Almost peaceful. She wrote down her mother’s address then hailed a Taxi to her house in Colonia Altavista, far more north than she was used to going in Mexico City.
She didn’t know what to expect. Not from the house, not from the neighborhood, and especially not from her mother. She’d not had time to consider anything, not really. Her mother could have been anyone. She supposed the same must be true of all mothers; perhaps she just wasn’t used to having one yet.
Eugenia stayed for the next four years. Her mother taught literature at UNAM and insisted Eugenia get a proper education.
“When I first met your father,” her mother said, but still smiling just slightly as she spoke of him, smiling despite herself and this was the moment Eugenia first realized she might one day be capable of loving this old woman, “he was the most brilliant poet I’d ever met. He was some wild gaucho, some rural poet like I’d never read before. Innately talented, top of his class. But he dropped out of the university one day and said he’d decided to ‘make his art his entire life.’
I was pregnant with you at the time. I thought he just liked to sound romantic and bohemian. Back then all of us liked to act and sound crazy every once in a while. I didn’t realize how sick he’d already become. The atmosphere of the time…helped mask it.”
Eugenia’s mother began to cry again.
“I loved your father, even when he began to slip into madness. But I’ll never forgive him for taking you from me. I knew he’d done it, of course. What kills me is that he still knew what it would do to me, that it would tear me apart. And he took you from me anyway, the bastard. I loved him, god knows I did. I took care of him for years and sacrificed my own life, my own career. But that’s just it, there was enough of him left in there to know what it meant. He knew what he did to me, how taking you was as good as tearing my heart in half. And he did it anyway, he took you in the night, right from your crib, Oh! I told the police, of course I did. For all the good they did me. But I never gave up. No, not for a moment. Not once. Not in all these years.”
“I never thought I’d see you again,” Eugenia told her mother. She said it, not emotionlessly, but with such exhaustion that her mother felt deeply moved.
“Are you tired mija?” she asked. “Are you ready for bed?”
“In a little bit,” Eugenia said. “Just read to me first. Just for a little while.”
“Read to you?” her mother questioned the request at first.
“Yes,” Eugenia asked, laying her head down on her mother’s lap.
“Of course mija,” her mother said, allowing herself to brush her daughter’s hair for the first time in eleven years. “Of course I will read to you. With me, you’ll never go hungry, and you’ll never lack for books. We’ll get you all the books you can read, and more! Because as you can see from the shelves around you, books are good company, and an unopened book is like a journey waiting to be taken. It’s a possibility. Even if we don’t get to them all in our lives, isn’t it nice to have the possibilities just floating around us?”
Eugenia’s mother sat, silver-haired, a pale outline in the house that smelled of dust and old books. And another smell. Her mother’s smell. Warm and human, slightly bitter. Eugenia knew it as she knew her own scent. As she knew her own blood.
Under her mother’s care Eugenia began writing poetry and prose. Eugenia initially showed a talent for more narrative poetry and in fact, her first publication “Big Country Sky,” a slim volume of economic, stark, strong poems (Written in English, her second language, and published by a small American press) each poem finely cut like a diamond. She was only nineteen years old when her first novel, Lágrimas del Payaso, came out in Mexico, put out by Anagrama to great acclaim. The novel, a bildungsroman based on her relationship with her father, went on to be adapted into a film with the part of her father being played by Gael Garcia Bernal.
Fame suited Eugenia.
She accepted literary awards dressed in full black-on-black Mariachi garb, tailor made for her. Some book critic, remarking on her eccentric style of dress, first called her “La Cuerva” in his review of Lagrimas del Payaso, which he lauded as one of the best first-novels, not just by any Mexican author of the last hundred years, but of any Latin American author of the last century.
“Our own storyteller, as important as Borges and as imaginative, emerging from the intersections of our city streets, where invisible people still perform feats of strength and endurance in hope of a little change handed to them through the tinted window of a passing car. Never has the disparity of Mexican class been more plainly critiqued than in this remarkable first novel by Eugenia Negroni, a name that promises a great future.”
Authenticity. Authentic pain. A dissolute childhood on the streets of one of the most dangerous cities on the planet. This is what Eugenia became famous for. At first.
Eugenia began to read voraciously. Soon, she was writing again, filling notebooks with poems and fabulous, small tales, some only a paragraph or two long, that could be quite disturbing in that childlike uncanny way where certain dark things surprise and shock us in the shadows that wouldn’t make us flinch during the day. Possibilities of a submerged kind.
Her mother worried when she read them and at the same time, saw the talent in her daughter’s work and felt proud. She encouraged her, but worried that the combination of sudden fame and unresolved grief and trauma would prove too much for her daughter. Steadily, Eugenia’s drinking increased. There hardly existed a promo photo without her, tequila shot in hand and cigar clenched in her white teeth.
Her work often dealt with the theme of the absent father. Eugenia returned to her first book-length poem, “My Father Eats Fire,” an experimental piece, closer to prose than poetry. It became the project to which Eugenia devoted all her energy and time. The manuscript took five years to complete and ended up the winner of a Pushcart Prize when she submitted a small segment of the poem separately as micro-fiction. It went on to win this much-lauded prize. The book itself was shortly after published in Spanish, in its entirety, by Anagrama, and was shortlisted for the Booker.
Eugenia found herself the rising star of her own upward-tilted dream. She read The Open Veins of Latin America and watched and re-watched “Hour of the Furnaces.” She went through a brief period of affiliation with the Communist Party of Mexico, but quit on the advice of her good friend and mentor, the writer Jose Emilio Pacheco.
When Eugenia became visibly pregnant, she told no one who the father was.
“This baby doesn’t need a goddamn father,” Eugenia slammed her fist defiantly, speaking in a tone with her mother that she only used this once in their long and storied life together. “I will be its family. And you will be its family. That’s all it needs and more, much more than I ever had. But we can’t stay here any longer.”
Eugenia had been offered a residency at UCLA and she seized the opportunity, moving her mother and the baby with her to the United States.
About a year into her stay in Los Angeles Eugenia completed work on her second novel, a book called Black Plague, which contains within it whispers of Donoso and the magical realism of the famous Boom writers, but it’s really much more of a neo baroque novel. A concerto for the new world, for Aztlan, for La Raza. A Chicano love poem written in geography and dust. Not that Eugenia could claim being Chicana, but that never stopped her. Eugenia, La Cuerva, could just as well have been called “The Chameleon.” Her ability to adopt and perfect new literary styles astounded readers and critics alike. In her life she produced twelve novels, fifteen books of poetry, six books of essays, and an anthology of her collected letters, mostly between her and her mother.
Around this time she came across the poetry of Badger Clarke, American Cowboy poet and figure of mythic proportions for all Outlaw Poets. Frontiersman. Cattleman. Adventurer. Walt Whitman of Cowboy Poets, primogenitor of the lyric troubadours of the range. The words that struck her were simple enough, that is, their meaning proved easy enough to grasp and yet reading them seared into her soul as surely and indelibly as the brand on a cattle’s hide.
The daybreak comes so pure and still.
He said that I was pure as dawn,
That day we climbed to Signal Hill.
She named her next collection of poetry Signal Hill, after Clarke and dedicated the book to him. The poems proved a palpable shift in a more pastoral direction. The poetry conjured the orange of a campfire at night and the eagerness of human beings to speak and be spoken to, even when they’re unable to listen. Even when they’re unable to utter a single word.
The book became an instant hit in the indie publishing world. Comparisons to Gloria Anzaldua came flooding in with the force of a rain-swollen bayou. Eugenia took to wearing full cowboy nudie suits and never left the house without her black snakeskin boots and wide-brimmed stetson. Around this time she became visibly drunk onstage during several recitals and once fell from the stool they’d set for her at Austin’s Paramount theater, a sold-out show, breaking her hip after only having gotten through a poem and a half.
The following decade, her self-described “Dark Ages,” were a haze of alcohol and pills. She came back from the broken hip with an Oxy habit on top of the drinking. Two monkeys clamoring on her back at all times, one fueling the other, burning into a toxic heat wave of craving and need.
She showed up broken on her mother’s stoop in Coyoacan, Mexico City. She’d spent her last penny getting on the plane. Her mother helped Eugenia stand. Behind her a small girl stood with raven hair and eyes that shone like sapphires.
“Mija,” Eugenia told her daughter Mariana. “There’s nothing to worry about. I’m going to get better.”
They brought the curanderas of the neighborhood to her bed and they burnt many herbs and filled her small bedroom with the pungent smoke. Eugenia coughed and coughed until the coughs began to wrack right through her, shuddering down her skeleton like an electric current. The women around her chanted in unison, beating her with handfuls of plants. She could feel the itch left on her skin from where the leaves had touched, like grass on a raw knee. Then Eugenia began to vomit and she did not stop for nearly six days. On the seventh, she arose like Christ from her sick bed and never took another drink for the rest of her life.
Eugenia lived out the rest of her life as a teacher, utterly devoted to her students. She taught at various universities in Mexico and the United States before ending up at The University of Houston. Eugenia moved her mother and daughter into an old, southern-styled mansion off Almeda Street. She remained and taught, produced work, and taught generations of students both the craft of writing and the social need, the importance and responsibility, of the writer to write against power.
Chris Flakus
GOD WILL KNOW HIS OWN
He always thought he was John Wayne in the Wild West, I walked with a slight limp and
exaggerated his arm swings. He liked to order his whiskey straight. He thought saying “neat”
might make him sound gay. You couldn’t argue with him about politics or religion. He didn’t
know much about either but was certain of his correctness.
Gun them all down
God will know his own he claimed
without any proof
Political signs decorated his porch and front lawn. He plastered simplistic slogans on his pickup
truck. Everyone needed to know what he believed and who he was planning on voting for in
November. Well, no one took him seriously. We just wish they really could take his guns.
He’ll kill us on faith
his convoluted beliefs
in everything wrong
LONE WOLF
He all too often promoted himself as a lone wolf. I never understood the notion. Wolves tend to
find their greatest success in packs. This lonely notion fostered by dreams of James Dean and a
rebel without a cause. It never led to any happiness or success. He was a lone wolf and he wore
the mask with great pride. I kept waiting for him to ride up on his motorcycle wearing his
leather jacket. In the end he mainly just became a parody of himself and a few Hollywood
images I was foolish enough to buy. It must be harsh to buy into a myth only to become a
caricature of yourself.
A mask worn tightly
hidden subtle human truths
always denial
perpetually buy in
the false notions we are sold
George Schaefer
the chainsaw boogie
There’s a right way to live
And a wrong way to live
And then there’s the way most of us live
Somewhere lost in the feral hazy of in-between
like where you find yourself when you move into
a rented single wide
Across the road from
Pandora O’Jesus
Your first impression of her
Teeth like the fangs of a raccoon
Ears like a jackalope
The terrible eyes of an abandoned dog
but big old knockers hang out of her overalls
And her wiry red hair is crowned by a greasy Dale Earnhardt cap
She grips a eighteen-inch Stihl chainsaw in one hand
a Schlitz beer in the other
and ZZ Top blares from somewhere deep inside her body
one of those boogie grooves that go on forever
you could have played it safe
you could have remained with that strawberry blond
who survived on her Reader’s Digest Sweepstakes income
you could have played it right
put up with her yoga, her sage, and her deputy district attorney mother
but you played it wrong and here you are
half-awake on your new rotting front porch
and there Pandora stands in the morning mist
eyes ablaze like brush fires of evil
hell dancing on her lips
and trouble snaking through her soul
like poison ivy entwined in a neglected rose bush
she gooses the Stihl
she guzzles the Schlitz
she flips you the bird
and life in all its fucked-up ambiguous glory
asks you “shall we dance?”
Preacher Allgood
Straight Out The Wild
A woman wearing fear on her pitiful face looks to her left, then right.
She says, “I hope you know that just telling you what happened is going to bring back the nightmares.”
Faith Hyland was a simple young woman, who enjoyed reading romance novels and eating chocolates after coming home from her job at the bank.
That morning, she got up and got ready for work like any other day, but that Friday all hell would break loose.
With no energy, she was daydreaming of being with Fabio on the beach. With kernels of corn stuck in his teeth, he says, “I can’t believe it’s not butter.”
Then the door bursts open.
Someone, carrying a sawed-off-shotgun, walked in wearing a tuxedo and a huge bunny-rabbit mask with the ears extra floppy.
Behind him walked in the polar bear, also wearing a tux as it aimed a 40 caliber automatic pistol right at the bank president.
Next, the dog walked in wearing jeans and a hoodie with a thick gold chain draped between the collar.
He said, “You guys ain’t shot anyone yet? I told you we have to come in here and show ‘em we mean business in this motherfucker.”
The rabbit looks at him, “Shut the fuck up, you ain’t calling the shots here, I am!”
Looking at the bank president, he said, “Now get someone back there cleaning out the vault. Have someone else empty every register up front.”
“Give us what we want, and I promise I’ll go hopping down the bunny trail without hurting anyone.”
………….
We pick up with Faith’s story already in progress.
“The things that dog did to me inside that vault. I will never get over it. It’ll be with me for the rest of my life.”
Strands of her blonde hair are sticking to the trail of tears running down her cheeks. She says, “That filthy animal scarred me! I can still feel the tip of the blade slicing into my back. Not only that, it’s the words he chose to carve into me.”
Photographs taken by police show the words whore, slut, and bitch carved deep into her back, all below her shoulder blades.
“Worse than all that, the bastard kept talking about how he was going to become a famous rapper after this bank robbery.”
In her mind she flashes back and can hear this depraved monster rapping in his ragged Saint Bernard mask.
“Pics of a bitch with no panties on
Playing with her pussy
Only thing that could have made it better
Is if she’d been wearing…
Freddy Krueger’s razor glove
Oh you think that’s shocking
You’re lucky I can’t get close enough
To show you this taser love
Wake up bound in ropes
All that begging and screaming
Doesn’t sound like hope
What you not digging my horrorcore raps
Bitch you’re a whore to the core
About to get slapped
No a man should never
Put his hands on a woman in anger
No but he could always pay another woman
To fuck her up
Say you get paid
When I get a pic
Of that slut bleeding profusely”
Bleeding profusely she was, her white button up blouse was almost completely red. Beating on the vault door, the bunny-rabbit yells, “Come on, get the money and let’s get the fuck out of here!”
The dog says, “Hold on, I’m coming!”
He tells Faith, “Okay bitch, I’m gonna pull my dick out and you go down on me one time before I walk outta here with all this money.”
He said, “I should have got you to do it from the start. I don’t know why I get so much pleasure out of hurting people. Anyway bitch, you bite me and I’m gonna blow your motherfucking pretty face off, you hear me?”
Outside the door, the polar bear tells the rabbit, “Come on man, this motherfucker has ruined everything. We gotta take the money from the registers and get the fuck out of here, before the law shows up!”
“Fuck that,” said the bunny-rabbit. “If they pull up he’s going to die inside that vault.”
“Now, leave that bitch alone and get the fuck out here!”
Faith gagging is the only response and then the sound of a hard slap.
The door opens and the dog says, “Come on, like you two wouldn’t have got some head from the bitch!”
The Polar bear says, “Yeah, but I wouldn’t have been in there rapping and mutilating the bitch, you dumbass!”
Walking out, the dog hands a duffel bag to each of his partners.
Pumping the sawed-off, the bunny-rabbit fires a shot at close range right into the dog’s ribcage, which nearly cuts him in half.
The two remaining bank robbers walk towards the door. The bunny-rabbit tells the polar bear, “I don’t see anything going on outside. So far so good.”
They both walk out with their nerves wreaking havoc and chaos. Seconds later, right on time, the getaway car arrives.
Behind the wheel is a goth chick with jet black hair and snake bites. Who says, “Hurry up, get the fuck in, the cops are just around the block.”
Faith Hyland won’t get a wink of sleep. Thinking of those sadistic criminals in their animal masks. Especially the dog, who got exactly what he deserved.
Bastard was a terrible rapper anyway.
CULTure Wars
the world is full of cults
at war with each other
for the simple fact
of fear in change
believing in different things
ideals & gods
with plenty of bullets and faith
on the surface
underneath
there’s a layer of primordial ooze
bohemian rhapsody
poetry & art
where differences
tell their truths
simultaneously
in truce
at war
changing things
right beneath their noses
James Dennis Casey Iv
FUN FACT: Originally titled GODS GUNS GLORY & GREED…waking up 4am in the morning before work to edit not always the greatest variable when uploading titles you cannot changes but what the hell…GUNS ARE GODS IN AMERICA BRINGING GLORY FUELED BY GREED!
It’s been surreal kids, now onto the rest of VOICES FROM THE FIRE where we will still be burning through early 2023!
Dumpster Fire Press 