Tuesday poem #652 : Mark Laba : Cooking for Guard Dogs While Off Anti-Depressants

 

 

Monday:
L’eau de chien chaude avec bisque de tomato,
wiener tournadoes mit security guard.
Remember it’s the security guard that makes
this dish.
Otherwise it’s just another fatty wiener in oil water.
French and German inspired with some
contemporary twists.
Well-suited to eating on a staircase before
descending into the glob truss
setting off the shift of skin against the
shadows of all three branches of government. 

Tuesday:
My corpuscles dream of Raquel Welch. 

Wednesday:
Now the leash is off.
The body returned to dusk.
There’s a lushness to the shrubs
bordering the industrial park and
the barking of accountants
echoing through the evening hush
where I also hear the odd thrush
regurgitating food for its young,
not unlike the way I was fed when
my skull was still mush. 

Thursday:
By this time, it’s a tax write-off as
I sit on the bird-shit covered dock
making up words to explain this
phenomenal phenobarbital pheasant hunt. 

Friday:
This is actually when
God rests and smokes a
pack of smotes and shoots thunderbolts
like a weekend warrior chased by guard dogs
across a used car lot and not caring a lot
if his face gets eaten off under the glare of
theft prevention lights. 

Saturday:
After bacon and eggs
astral projection and then a visit
to the casino using my magic umbilical cord
to sway the slot machines into paying out huge
winnings, which I then stuff into
sauce casings. They can carry
more coins than you’d think and
in the alluvial times were used to knock
out your enemy with a might swing. 

Sunday:
Certain days make me think of
owls in washing machines and
the wind blowing through the skull
of Walt Disney,
a pleasurable dread before the eventual upheaval,
the trajectories of rival satellites
blowing themselves to smithereens
over a lovely afternoon at the public pool.

 

 

 

Mark Laba’s most recent books are Dummy Spit (Mercury, 2002), and The Inflatable Life (Anvil, 2019). He’s been in a bunch of other things, albeit intermittently. He won the first bpNichol chapbook award for The Mack Bolan Poems (Gesture, 1985). For eight years he was the restaurant reviewer for the Province newspaper in Vancouver.

the Tuesday poem is curated by rob mclennan