Poetry by Vin Whitman ÷ Art by Jessie Link

Pink orphan android

Chickens’ empty peck

Under open funeral skies

Oval trace of mourning

Egg’s divine structure

Over busy

Chip away weak spots

Bound for cities tall and slender

Too good for your

Dust polished limbs

Valentine tremens trigger

Romantic feelings of vertigo

For such specific molecules

Weather vane syringe

With hypodermic beak

Locates buried fantasies

Tiny red crevice

Becomes the credibility gap

Between gingham PJ’s

And Death

Secrets only stroke the sun

One night at a time

While daughters orbit

Bound with bed clothes

And cigarette endings

Punish meant

Needle-point reverie

Or one more blister

For eighteen covert years

Blank rubber stares

With no answers hung

On optic nails

Casket closed like a rosebud

Rooster posts a picture

I CAN WRITE ANYTHING

I can write anything I want

If it stops the press of saying no out loud

Right?…a gentle carbon punch against the crystal windshield

The shards left of its temper

Critically injure

When a truth is spoken now or written later

Why should I swallow the tongue’s thoughtless

Edges, which cut me into tired archetypes

I’ve been a diamond in the rough, a triangle skirt with legs,

Trapped in a trapezoid waiting room, and finally a person

Whose mouth is a tiny stop sign

Whose hands nudge a traffic of words

Past audio drive-thrus where talk comes with a side of fries

And a law degree

From the institute attended

By every attention whore’s fingertips

Every photographed memory’s lips

My crystal eyeballs plucked

And displaying hate speech winning the race

While obscenity slinks away on its belly

New voices will rise from our keyboards

Then our faces will wear those expressions

Like surveillance cameras

ON THE DAY OF MY SPIRIT POSSESSION

Have my understudies bailed?

Detached from the nerve behind the curtain? has my monkey-paw let go

Of its chi? Has my hawk’s eye discovered internet porn?

Our globe is bobbing on the surface

Of a liquid rooftop right here in space

I control it with my footsteps

And I’m careful to never trip

I control it with my thumbs

As nature intended

I control it with my thoughts

Which I can’t control at all

Which my monkey and understudy

Abandoned

Even my techno-entities, my

Softly screeching demons

Have transferred data

From my head to your bank account

My spirit guides are gargoyles

Too stoned to whisper forethought

At my inner ear

I was undone by spirits last year

Now I tread carefully

In their midst,

Walk respectfully

Around their closed circles

My delicate drum head

Was slit like cellophane with

A scissor’s cold regard

An acute glint off the cathedral’s windshield

Halted my lungs in

Their silver inhalation

An ache

Ripped into my temple, through eyes

Etched in lightning

Scrambling Now’s pixels to resemble

The Past

The archives we shouldn’t visit lightly

I arrived at the shady

Monastery

Not just my temporal confessional

But the guest house of big karma

Pushing its own daisy’s agenda

Based on the opponent’s lotus

I am no teacher, no

Gardener

I am a voice with plenty of range

But each generation has room on its

Arc for one poet

And I wasn’t chosen

Death does not end our duties

To the living

They continue, incorporeal,

Through umbilical migraines

Sockets exposed & wired

To history’s minutes

Divine absolution soldered to their

X rated intentions

Vin Whitman julletteway@msn.com

See more urban art from Jesse Link at www.jesselink.com