Wayne Allen Sallee & DBE

The following poems by Wayne Allen Sallee appeared in the poetry anthology I released way back when, Dead Blue Eyes. Wayne has kindly given me permission to reprint them here.

#

together in black & white

in pages of dark fantasy
within a time too late
they were found again,
whole years later,
she in ebon garters
licking smooth the bullet
hole in his skull, the
one he made when they were
together in black & white

#

they talk of hell

january sweat, you'd think el
nino but no, it's the wrong
kind, fills my lungs
the passengers on the train
standing, they talk of hell,
and me, i'm afraid
to check for maggots
crawling under my neck

#

SECRETS THAT YOU KEEP

I know secrets.
I know which bus drivers
do not look to see
if your transfer has
expired. I know
which waitresses
will give you an extra
bun. How to get
the boss to like you.
There is only one
other man in Chicago
who knows these
secrets. He stands
naked in the alley
off Van Buren, hissing
to passers-by: You want
to see something stinky?
If you get close
enough, he will stick
razorblades
into your eyelids.

Two by Wayne Allen Sallee

Bellair, Illinois, 1984

With molten veins and cool
logic beating with infantry percussion,
Bus Downey, foundation digger and man,
sees a day of Minutemen
bolting skies grey with disbelief.

Planting his spade
in sodden ground,
he thinks of the children.

#

GILL-MAN GONE

the two boys ripple
forgetting that creatures
and lagoons still exist
or perhaps
they haven’t seen
the movie

7th Street Cuddle-Up by Wayne Allen Sallee

her supplicating arms
beckoned
and he stumbled
to his death
; tongue on electric fingertips
palpable as suck-
ing on copper
batteries in a night so clear
downtown stairs
were voyeurs to grime
too late. he wished
for that Arizona
trip and she wrapped him
in sleep --
a beat cop found him
at dawn,
terror piss frozen
on
his
leg

A Rural Truth as Ugly by Wayne Allen Sallee

Too quiet.
Then an electric snap
and a gentle blue: the end
of a stupid moth's
existence
in God's country.
Etchison's Dark Country.
Spider country.
Followed
by wind flaps
in farmer sheets
and panties gray
with hard water
from God's Country.
Etchison's... flapwup
a cross
between a sock stretched
taut in a funereal getup
or the chopper
blades reprimanding
that Morrow finish
the scene right.
Farmers expect that.
A funereal Get! Up!
Milk that goat at 7:00:00 am.
Guilt instilled
with every crap
turd dropping with flies.
The best and the brightest:
Farmers are. And after
the crops are tended
and the hay baled
and the straw is pitched
and the dishes are done
and before the sermons
they attend
to clubbing a deformed
calf and slip food
under sooty doors
keeping an embarrassment
of retardation from
the other good farmers
of spider country.
God's... it is not finished.
Soon babies born
one arm short
will be jammed in a butter
churn and churned and churned
until its flesh is slag,
but it sure did its part, by gum!
Butter for all,
to appease the bitch --
goddess of the plains.
The sky is a killing jar
set atop a big table
of squares of wheat
and corns and stuff.
Drink your Busch
beer quickly, my friend,
for this I know:
The Wabash Valley eats her dead.
The ground moves
with the fodder
of simple cattle
that has been there
since Lincoln freed
the slaves and beyond.
God Bless America.
God Bless Us All.
Farmers are strong
like bull.

Bone Tunes by Wayne Allen Sallee

I grasp my journal as if it were a violin
And think of the false rhymes: women & chagrin
Same old bone tunes, night and day
My nerve endings strings that the lesser gods play

I Can't Come Clean by Wayne Allen Sallee

another rainstorm, another night
the train rushes past cornfields,
a ruined city, the red wink
of a soft drink machine, a mile
away, in a dead parking lot

hand and forehead pressed
bone white against club car window,
ginger ale and crackers to calm
my nerves, though I'm not even
suspect in the Terre Haute carnage
three hours by rail behind me

I am so old, I have outlived Bundy
and Gacy and the BTK Strangler,
so old a stiff drink cannot help,
a quick confession cannot hurt,
hand and forehead smashed bone

white against wet glass, left eye
seeing vacant streets, right eye
seeing right eye and a man never
in his right mind, hand falls away,
making a sound I heard Janet Leigh
made in that shower in that movie

in my youth