joe haskins | nine poems

joe haskins | nine poems

Increasing Stammer; Encounter with the Profane

running my fingers
over the gleaming
steel
i can feel your smile
your teeth
click.


barrel locks
I can see clearly
end of long barrel
pushed firmly
into your cheek
stretching your skin


almost, imitating the daily
smirk and grimace
you dish out, daily
with shallow
self-absorbed
new-age confidence
almost.


what you see through others
is the very housing you lack
and so blindly try to obtain


i don’t give a fuck
how many brain-change methods you’re using
you keep coming back, the same
axis
same orbit
galaxies suspended in your ignorance


so many questions, right?
pontificating face down into glass-shard-oblivion
oh to seed that black hole
to answer a cosmogenic question for you
to give you that magic encounter you’ve always wanted
and falsely believed existed


this is your black hole, baby
now you see it
now you don’t.

Birds Can Swim, the Devil Says So

She told me not to say anything
suspended in lost logos animal rind
we grilled lost albatross that
swam out of her ass
and fried albatross until
the sun poured like confectionary  sugar
over the new children
and we used mirrors as books
our reflections endless pages
unauthored
crammed with infinite text
acrobatic dance of
hyper text pouring
comprising the horific libation
God’s cataracts

Pearl Consumption

gentle
drip
inside-sizzle
of animal-fat
organic-tectonic-crust
churning peristalsis
peristaltic-awareness
wolf-stammer
within a
sun-sunken
gray-field
slow-motion-stalk
olfactory-hyper-sensitivity
prey-smell
sweat-drop
hormone-stalk
wolf-howl
growl
I go / into the
trembling
into the
gum-quiver
muscle-flinch
synapse-communion
before the
pearl-consumption
TEARING
orgasmic-blood -rapture.
I
AM

……………GONE.

Extinction’s My Ticket

there comes a moment
when you look up
and the room has tilted
just slightly
and you realize
once again
that everything’s on an
axis, a pivot
I have intermittent
experiences of vertigo
and it only takes one
second
for me to transform
into
blackbird
soaring
your solar soul-scape
solar plexus terrain
which is night time terrain
and oceanic
it only takes one
second
to be scavenging in your
waters
harsh or calm
extracting fish from your
waters
excavating your psychic
trough
a historic
food chain
and it only takes me one
second
to snap back
when your waters
have nothing
left

Cat of 9

eyes gaze
cat of 9
tails
lashing
salt wound licks
my
christ-wounds-bleeding
your eyes gaze
violent un-surrender
cerberus-mouth-growl
drool


cerberus-cut-throat
razor-snarl
flesh-tear
skin-release
immediacy
with no chance
of
scars

One More ‘OM’

one more book
one more poet
so fucking tiring


one more noose
one more chair to kick
one more death
haven
tuck and roll


one more inferno
one more line
one more


word to rub out


one more
night-ring-ouroboros


one more conversation
one more affirmation
one more doubt
one more
exhaustion


one more incineration
one more decomposition
soil-kiss


one more word in the ground


one more grave digger
one more necromancer
one more swoon
night fuck mortician
serial-writer


gently weaving
one more noose
one more
chair-kick
one more
snap
one more
drop
one more death-kiss
one more distant croon
forgotten
once more

Struck

everything.
one bullet loaded into the chamber
one tablet dropped into the glass
slow absorbtion distillation


needing to write for exfoliation


where to begin
how far to take
the trigger pull
trigger squeeze
before the primers
struck.

Waft.

i am the cold-encasing
run of the mill
shell-drop
burnt-gun-powder
you want that sulfur high?
i am the cold-encasing
sun-drop
body-ground impact
black sun encounter
death-resonance
you want that sulfur high?
this, is
concrete shadow-love
cold-encasing
death-resonance
last repetition
cosmic-resonance
death-encasing
fading-chimera
last-encounter-repetition
pungent-oblivion
powdered-mirror-portal
exit-wound-tantric-kiss
oblivion
love-me
oblivion-love-me
love-me
oblivion-love
me, listen
oblivion
listen
love me.

laceration-sting-kiss

robert johnsons long fingers
skip james voice licking the soul
the immense vacuous terrains
falling under the heading
dive bars
the even more vacuous terrain
suburban-dredge
swamp-haven
the quick
existential-whip-lash
striking an immense match and
flame
engorging
one innocent one, hanging on
to the edge of an invisible cliff
invisible precipice
out of sight out of mind
an adage long pre dating the new agers
I want to introduce her to my tommy gun
but the echoes of todd moore, or rather my shadows
scare her, perturb her or flat out do not interest her
it doesn’t matter which of these is true
and my shadow has such a grip on myself
I grapple with it, staring into my own image
the obsidian vanity-mirror
simpleton bereft of meaning
fucking my own shadow
and all the observers
who have yet
to have
the match-strike
fizzle-temporal-burn
the awakening within
perception of the outside-other
fold
the subtle-sensual-sting
laceration-sting-kiss
do you enjoy
walking backwards
towards the crossroads?

joe haskins | nine poems

“Amorphous. That’s the word I chose when asked by my professor to pick an adjective describing myself and then write on it. We all know that task, and I hated it. Rub out the word and you grasp amorphous.”

“Discovering Todd Moore’s work, not only his poetry but his articles on what it means to be an ‘outlaw’ writer greatly resonated with me. It was what I was already doing, it was in my blood. When I first received copies of ‘Dillinger’, marked with a drop of Moore’s actual blood on the first page, I strapped it to the back of my motorcycle and rode with no destination in mind. It later dawned on me that I was re-animating Moore’s blood-dna, setting it in motion once more, Moore’s blood and words literally hurtling down the veins of highway 101 in Southern California. I think he would have liked that.”

Joe Haskins

hails from Leucadia, California though born in Northampton, England in 1987. His latest zine is double-sided, the first side ‘Waft’ containing poems, the flip side ‘Exoskeleton Myth’ containing surrealist-fiction, described as a kind of meeting between Gherasim Luca and Steven Jesse Bernstein, published under the psuedonym: ‘Kamikaze Pedestrian’. ‘Permanent Mayhem’ was his first zine which included visual work in addition to poetry. Forthcoming, ‘Preliminary Autopsy’ and ‘Screaming Deficit’ self published under the guise of Scalpel House Press. He is heavily influenced by Todd Moore, Tony Moffeit, David Lerner, Antonin Artaud, Steven Jesse Bernstein, D.A. Levy, Tricia Warden, Tony Fitzpatrick, Daniel Higgs, to name a few. He tends not to frequent poetry readings, unless he needs ‘negative inspiration’.

“All inspiration is positive, but its source can be negative. Most of the readings I’ve attended have been so filled with trite quips or over-pontificating drivel that I leave feeling enraged. I channel that anger into my writing and later, grateful for the charge.”

Rub out the word, but first we’ve gotta detonate.

joe haskins | nine poems

0 Replies to “joe haskins | nine poems”

  1. Joe Haskins poetry gives us a visual axis which transforms
    language of the unexpected animal, veggie, or mineral
    variety to suite the taste of a surrealist in his fantastic reveries

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