Franz in the Evening
Felon
Vicodin
Patrimony
Poetry
Liar
Felon
Two Different Cockroaches
Mesmerism
Dostoevsky
A Well
He’s reading Dostoevsky again
as the lamp
flickers and rain pounds
a bedroom window—
where did those lies go?
Tumbler of J&B up to the brim;
whetstone leaning against the wall.
There’s a love poem dangling in midair
Franz, alone, is wearing women’s underwear
knife under his pillow, repeating
Ivan kept staring at him;
he seemed to have lost his tongue.
A white horse runs
in the night sky, a rose
and a severed hand clenched in its jaw.
At booking they press my finger
into ink, snap a quick picture
where I stare straight ahead
at a white concrete wall. Intake
is jammed, men wait in cells
to be processed, trade their street
clothes for orange tops, pants,
rubber shoes. How did this happen?
I dreamt once of a poem—
in it the sea, hands of wire,
wet books: pages torn and curling
in the wind. I felt both there and gone,
floating over sand. Will I change
or end up old, locked away?
They ask about school, occupation.
I have nothing to say, reply no.
My hair is like Rimbaud’s.
Scratching these lines from
the Trumbull County Jail, Thanks-
giving into the new year.
No one would answer the phone.
No one—remember—would post
my bail. Inmates
touching shoulders staring as fireworks
blast. I never left
my bunk—springs vibrate, stack
of torn books. I quit drinking
then I got drunk. I quit drugs
then aluminum foil burn
scalding my fingernail.
The reader is dead. The reader is in hell.
It’s the painter, snake as totem,
asp wrapping—a scarf
of scales pressing into skin.
I’m Oblomov. Self-Portrait with
Yellow Bruised Neck.
Handcuffs.
I rent an apartment. The car’s a lease.
I own nothing. My name is the same
as my father’s and his father’s.
He died nine years before I was here.
His first wife committed suicide shortly
after their daughter, Doris, was born.
A tall hat, a pipe. In one photo
he wears thick, black glasses.
He remarried and had my aunt Nancy
then my father. In a polaroid my father crouches
in a garden, wide smirk on his face, written
underneath—1968. Eleven years before
I was here. He moved to Ohio
started working at General Motors.
Married, divorced, met my mother.
In 1999, when a close friend died, I tried
to believe in God. It lasted six months.
When I was five my father took me to a funeral
in Tennessee. He was a pall bearer. He left
to carry the casket, I went looking for him.
Heard bells ring. Red exit sign. He was a spray painter
then an inspector. After high school
I worked at Kraftmaid on a rip and crosscut
saw. He’s been dead ten years my mother says.
Once, he appeared in a dream:
We’re sitting side by side in a red truck.
He keeps driving. My wife just left me.
I lie on the couch in the apartment,
open a book. Nowhere to go.
Alone. I own nothing.
I.
Threw my pen in the sea, my paper, too!
Talking with the corpse…
it warns me to be quiet, close
my eyes. It’s sick
of my lectures, how I read
André Gide out loud leaning against wet rocks.
How I say phalanx, cellar door.
I’m mercilessly beating the carcass of a horse.
I’m pouring red wine into a hole in its flank.
Writing this scree with a fingernail
because my pencil has vanished.
Laughter padlock hideous black water.
I’m alone with the dead
clutching a Geiger counter.
II.
Charles Kell, in hell.
Feels around in empty pockets
for a coin to toss, locket with his
dead mother’s brown hair. Nothing’s there.
He should be folded into a pretzel
& dropped on the raft. Laugh at his
bloated six pack & flabby traps. Slice
his bicep: feed half to the little
Mariana fruit bat on the bank (extinct
now, too); use the stringy bits to make
a kite. He wants to be alive again; he tears
at his skin. Sticks his dick in a Sulphur
pillow. A pile of cells built by pills.
Charles Kell, hear the bell?
III.
He paints a brick fireplace
over a black fireplace.
Stack of buttons on the table.
He’s dropping flies over them—a waterfall!
This time last year he was on a beach
next to a mountain next to another beach
where naked men & women cavorted
under the opulent glare
of the burning sun. He was too embarrassed
so he simply stared. He felt
like a puppet on a table where
an invisible god dropped dead flies
into his hair.
He was reading Jude the Obscure.
Drunks can’t keep secrets.
Fifty-dollar friend with no place to go
until you see the face with regret.
Wish you didn’t know what you now know.
His mother is sick, little brother just died.
Strung out, the look in his eyes you’ll never forget—
late at night, in the dark, the way he cried.
Drunks can’t keep secrets.
I left this town then came back—
a mistake on repeat—glasses, pen, beard: a mask.
We were in my car in the trailer park, high on crack;
he was a yellow skeleton, death grip on his flask.
That look in his eyes I’ll never forget.
Sick friend with no place to go.
I pretend not to know what I don’t want to know.
Drunks can’t keep secrets.
Back to jail in shorts
and a polo shirt.
Bottle of Bombay
Sapphire, smashed.
Town Car hosed down
on St. Rt. 88—
wet concrete but not so bad
to rest my head.
Some gin I pour down
the drain, some I swig.
Some life drowns
in the rain, stuck
wheezing in a leaf-
congested drain. Some life
chokes on a twig.
Listen, Heathen:
It may be that in every
traitor there is a thirst
for opprobrium,
and that his choice
of betrayal depends
on the degree of solitude
he aspires to, says
E.M. Cioran, who is
both a liar and a saint.
I.
I laugh and vibrate, lean Cassius
splayed on a summer lawn.
Drops of lilac perfume roll down
my thorax. The bomb feels
good. Here alone in the rubble
with a thin man who carelessly
grips a pencil, can of sardines
between us. In a white satin dress
all night under the poet’s black lamp
letting long streams of cigarette
smoke caress me.
II.
Back from the war and disenchanted.
I wanted jewels but all I have
are rotting mandibles.
Love ruined me you never answered a single
letter. I was trained in calligraphy
before battle—no one cares!
Back, despondent. I want to roll in chiffon.
Gaze out my cellophane window
at mountains, the sea. Dream
of my favorite scene:
Horatio performing fellatio
on Hamlet’s lukewarm carcass.
There are bad times and there are bad times.
Yellow Sunday morning, light on the wall in wavy lines.
We’re calling the guise out from under the disguise.
I watch you looking at yourself in the mirror looking wise.
Cigarette butts in champagne flutes, buzzing neon sign.
We’re in a motel holding hands, drinking warm white wine.
You grip my dick like a magnetic pendulum, then shift gears….
The dead beetle under the table is the innocent bystander.
The dead are simply dead and will always stay that way.
You’ve never accepted that the dead aren’t here to stay.
Boredom, love, is the highest form of happiness.
Revenge is a bent syringe in cold broth in a slivered dish.
I’m a midnight cactus capering over wet sand in the rain.
I crave raw red meat and cocaine.
You laugh?
You don’t believe
in the devil?
Disbelief
in the devil
is a frivolous
notion,
a French
notion. You
laugh at his
form,
following
Voltaire,
at his hoofs,
his tail,
his horns,
which you
have invented,
for the unclean
spirit
is a great
and terrible
spirit you
have invented
for him.
It’s easier
to die
among trees
than among
people.
The country slept as I wandered through a damp
field—inside burned an illiterate lust—then my eye
caught a shimmer of stone, intricate work weaved
in a circle. I crept and peered down into a well,
saw black, felt wind whip my brow, dropped a pebble
into the void, waited to hear splash but instead
the drumming of palm on flesh. I felt drunk so I took
off my clothes and climbed in. It were as though my
feet broke ice, my hands slipped down the mossy sides.
All at once a dozen fingers gripped me—I heard a piano
then listened to whispers: a young boy in a soft voice
said my name, then a sharp claw on my chest. I know you
don’t believe me but I remember being in the womb:
I thought of what was outside and let loose a silent scream.
I was born a heathen, have never mouthed a sincere prayer.
I tell you this, friend, because I felt the same way down
in the well. A demon plucked something from inside.
Sweaty, feverish, the darkness was delicious.
My skin blistered a festival; I spit congealed blades
of grass onto the viscous wall; I could smell the thin
mercury blood rusting on a bandage and recalled when
my sister was sick and my body broke out in angry, yellow
boils. I attacked each with a needle, squeezing pus
into small vials. On the day of her funeral rain
turned the hillside cemetery into a muddy mound,
hail stormed cracking a window. I drank and was healed.
I painted in oil on an unprimed canvas—the cemetery,
mourners, my sister in her shroud. I etched a small
demon by the edge. My flesh sated—it all came true.
I climbed out of the well ready to sing.
Charles Kell is the author of Ishmael Mask, (Autumn House Press, 2023.) His first collection, Cage of Lit Glass, (Autumn House Press, 2019) was chosen by Kimiko Hahn for the 2018 Autumn House Press Poetry Prize.
