Five Poems by Heath Brougher

The Poetry Addict 

 

Take off your clothes and let the public

rub you, how false a prophet? 

how phony a poet?, how lousy a man who bares 

himself to the spectacle of sheerest rape?

a rebirth of the Retrograde

and how long have you been so empty and naked?

how much pallor are you going to let them see?

is it possible to sell your soul and not know it?

will you find solace in telling yourself 

you were not as fake as the rest?, is that even True?,

how surprised are you to have failed yourself to death?

you’ve been mainlining emptiness for over 3 years,

could you’ve ever imagined you’d reach a point 

where you’d know for certain your mantra 

should really be “don’t believe the truth”?

how did you ever fuck 

it up this bad?!

 

 

Anti-Ode to the Crooked Police in York, PA 

 

I spilt off the leash 

as my throat toted a bottle of rancid asphyxiation 

within my tonsils. I scream out informing you 

I have egg yolk in my eye southstretched 

imagining to create every cop’s headpop 

roadclosures. Smug blue candles steeped

in sadism. Houston, Boston, Tucson, Tahiti,

we’ve got the largest problems ever. 

Eater of applecores. 

Sheen. Too American for the blue boy group 

headed by the evilboned fakesmile 

of Officer Criminal. Lost of shine. 

Keep me outta your sins. Officer, 

you knowingly killed my dog! Foolish 

me to ever trust the Quo. Avaricious monkeys 

are slaves but too dumb to know it. 

No ideas will not be entertained or tolerated 

on the off-chance of a proximitous mix-up.

 

 

Monopolie

 

the deck is stacked when the joker runs wild / the leopard instinctively bathes her newborns and ties their shoes / suddenly stripped by sniperslugs that fell snipt from skies bellowing / Delilah deletes her long distance journey to spend more time with the roaches / the ultimate coincidence is fourteen of my May Fair goldfish I’ve won have died on the exact same day fourteen years in a row / bottlenosed dolphins and needlenosed neurotoxins / colored plaid really don’t create anything special when mixed together other than a mundane monochrome of autumnal essence / a pure white pirouette / time unfurls but as if in logarithmic logotypes of the present and future being vacuumed into the past / long lost and gone forever upon ruby hummingbird wings / as the suction slowly ceases / pouring us back into the present / and reminding us that a nonspherical spirit of a monster’s tear / is quite lovely at his time of year.

 

 

Roulette 

 

The man 

who sold

the Universe 

only to fall

off the earth 

was found punchdrunk 

and discombobulated 

in a suicidal in barn in South Dakota.

 

 

Built to Vomit Vaseline

 

No one

has ever 

fully lived

until they

have died.

 

Scars and bumper-cars.

 

Swastika and Crucifix.

 

Futility and meaning.

 

 

                      Im-permanence.

Heath Brougher is the Editor-in-Chief of Concrete Mist Press as well as poetry editor of Into the Void, winner of the 2017 and 2018 Saboteur Awards for Best Magazine. A multiple Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net Nominee, he received Taj Mahal Review’s 2018 Poet of the Year Award. He is the recent recipient of the 2020 Wakefield Prize for Poetry and is slowly starting to wade back into the world of focusing on his own work, with 4 books due out in the near future.