Wild Age Press Honorable Mention poems

Here's some nice news:

Wild Age Press gave me an honorable mention in their "Anything Goes" poem contest. They put up a photo and bio of me (which, perhaps, you were looking at just before clicking over here to read my honorably mentioned poems). 

Editor Kelly Lynn Thomas says these poems earned the mention "for their innovative form, strong imagery, and fascinating subject matter."

They are queron, a 17-line poetry form of my own devising. I hope you will enjoy. Smiley face.

  * * *

"Serious Ink"

“Pinstriped skin? You want pinstriped skin?”

So, needlessly, you repeat it.

“Okay, okay. The Pinstripe Kid.”

He’s old. He fetches his needles

and a jar of powdered black ink.

“Take a couple months. At least weeks,

you know.” Yes, you know. The man slakes

the ink from a cracking teapot.

Though chilly, you take off your slacks.

“So what’s up?” he asks. “You pissed off

at your mother?” But when he asks,

it’s at the back wall, an aside.

So you don’t say anything.  “Fuck,”

he barks, laughs or coughs.  What?  “Hell. Stripes.

You know? Never mind. You ready?”

You are. Each etching stroke feels like

bursting across a finish line.

   * * *

"Now You Know"

Do porcupines masturbate? Answer: Yes.

I guess naturalists must have seen it,

but I learned it from Trivial Pursuits.

“What’s trivial,” asks the spiny rodent,

“about pursuing pleasure?” I’ll say this:

when I think how everyone masturbates,

I picture Ronald and Nancy Reagan

around the start of the 1980s.

They weren’t attractive, but I was thirteen,

with certain chemistries coalescing.

“That’s hilarious,” laughs the porcupine,

“if I’m to judge. Say, do you have something

salty to eat?” To be clear, the Reagans

are not objects of my fantasizing.

I just think of them as masturbators,

standing for all humans as such. “I think

playing is why we live,” it says, chewing.

   * * *

"A Vision During a Vision Quest"

What happens as I watch a spider’s web
over a small stream? After many hours,
a wave of bugs on an advancing wind
washes over the spot. “It’s the spider’s
fortune,” I think, watching several wing pairs

stick and tangle. Only then do I hear
the approaching rustle behind the swarm.
It’s a woman in hiking boots, long hair,
and a bikini, swinging, like Occam’s
Razor, a broad stick to de-web her way.

“Hi.” She could be a god in human form.
“Ya’ll having a party over at Bonne’s?”
“It’s a retreat.” Her hips shift and she seems
to give, by repetition, a koan:
“Ya’ll having a party?” I don’t know. Her

weedy pubes spin out thick and uncontained.
When she blazes on, the spider web’s gone.