Andy Riverbed

air condition

Air-conditioning is a necessity close to the equator.

The sky is clear as I look outside from my air-conditioned apartment.

That doesn’t mean anything to me.

I wanted to make love to a monkey once but thoughts of my dog stopped me.

It would’ve been in an air-conditioned room.

I pay money for this comfort, and this awareness sits across my face.

The hum makes me hear other hums, and the space around is full of noise.

Everything chants of sound, growls that if visualized

would be circling spins which lead nowhere.

Like a trip to a far away land which doesn’t change you.

Like living in a new country, but months later nobody knows your name.

Air-conditioning makes things better.

Achievement for the underdog

The walk down to the punk house is slow

and the night gives slight illumination,

enough to be able to see the sidewalk

down through the southeast side of town.

A helicopter buzzes above

looking for something:

Weed crops?

A fugitive?

Some hoods initiating themselves?

I cross the street and a girl across from me looks the other way.

Her chubby face is pale in the night, her short skirt shows her thick thighs.

She doesn’t smell bad like those two bums I saw the other day:

The man, long and skinny and wasted,

covered the female’s body while they rubbed each other naked

on the green field between two abandoned buildings in front of a metal gate.

Opposite them, under the shadow of the opposing building,

was a homeless man ignoring their howls of pleasure in attempt to get his beauty rest.

I pass the girl and try not to notice that a car has stopped

and from the inside of that car all I can hear are dark voices.

The car drives past me  into the distance and its lights disappear.

Did it turn off, or is it too far away to see anymore?

I look behind myself and the girl is gone.

*

How about the paraplegic who’s sent to Africa to teach homemaking?

Or the man who forces his wife to breast-feed his puppies

and her next child is born rabid?

Give money to rich people on the street because, unlike the poor,

they will spend it on productive things like their daughter’s plastic surgery

or vegan food because it’s healthy.

Don’t vote for Democrats because they’re Socialists

and red is my most hated color.

I like to dress in burgundy with green, lateral stripes.

*

After the show we were all drunken and beat

on the couch, and Rily and I decided to walk outside.

The streets were red brick-tiled.

We went under a bridge in front of Sam’s house,

which led us to a grocery stand owned by a troll.

He wouldn’t take our EBT cards, only gold coins.

There was no money-exchange machine,

and he told us, “I don’t take that poor people money,”

and jumped onto the counter to moon us.

On his butt, he had a big pimple

which I couldn’t resist but to pop.

Guava jelly vomited from its head,

and I happened to have bread in my hands

because Sam’s roommate worked at a restaurant

which gave him tons of free bread,

and I was very hungry that morning.

I had four slices with me during that walk.

Two of them had creamy peanut butter.

Achievement for the underdog

A turkey stuffed with wooden chandeliers

Praise Old Dirty Bastard as an Eskimo

in an igloo awaiting the next morning

when he will be put on a raft

and pushed away to die.

He is smoking crystal meth, a lot of it,

he bought from a peddler just around the corner

in Alaska. There’s no crack, this up north.

Praise ODB as a cockroach, standing in front

of his condo’s apartment door without

knocking, waiting for the door to open by itself.

ODB as a cockroach says,

“I’m a turkey of carved fillings,

stuffed of wood chandeliers.

Pieces of metal in my stuffing

makes pain when you vomit me.”

ODB truly wants to be a dolphin

tattooed on the hip bone of a seventeen

year-old dirty-blond in Miami.

Praise ODB suffering the

to-America disease of migration.

In a plane headed to California

a Philippine hooker, in the half-distance

between Quezon City to L.A.,

combusts and is now an

idolized college football player.

ODB himself was once a

four-foot-five Catholic school girl

with ceramic skin and dead-lace black

hair, brown marble eyes.

She flew in from outer-space,

and before her shuttle broke into

the Atlantic Ocean, she phased

into ODB and the Brooklyn Zoo.

It was because she became so many

that they survived and attained

America. That dirty-blond in Miami

is in love with someone who

pushes him away. In his depression,

he pushes away another person

who’s in love with him.

ODB, the morning he is pushed off into sea,

cries, not because he will soon die,

not because he will die alone,

but because he’s out of crystal meth.

Still hungry

Two lost dogs looking for food.

Days without sanctuary,

the dogs are hungry and sniff the ground as they tread.

They think their days requicital.

The air is cold.

In a park they find a box of left-over fried chicken

and do not share. They hoot

and show their mandibles.

They are bored with their lives.

As they clasp from each other pieces of chicken,

the building creates slanted shadows.

Cars sever through the gargantuan shades.

The traffic light changes are instinct to the dogs.

In the end neither is fulfilled. Both are still hungry.