Scott Wichmann (swichmann@linksys.com) reports he's: scott wichmann (witch'.man), an almost-starving l.a. screenwriter and performance artist who did the english trip through u.c. irvine, an over-planned city where ever-youthful suburban beat Poets in berets and H. Clinton haircuts pile into minivan caravans with Gourmet Coffee Travel Mugs to the corner barnes and ignoble to snap their fingers after flourescent lighting lit readings from pages laminated and three-hole-punched in notebooks.

this is not me. i'm ghostwriting to eat , and the poem for sanity. The Aim is to make it sound better when read aloud, ALOUD, especially if paused and syncopated idiosync ratically on the fly.


leftovers


you're
what's left after
your middle busts
and the food still sitting
slopes and cycles
on short hairy legs,
it's fast and un-becoming
while your cow belly
bulges like apples
and you quietly rip one flat.

i'm answering
my mother's prayers
wearing your culinary
prescriptions taped to my aft,
you are really cooking now like her
and wearing
you is dressing in drag,
i'm not who I am,
my excuse is that i'm short
and I excuse myself
it's your pork chops when my bloomers rip,
hardening armor coming full circle
like these coffins before and behind me,
oh look it's a plate.

you're laughing
and hanging mutton,
and I think for the first time
of bony orphans
like sheets flapping
while I'm busy being
stuffed like hares in a crock,
the potato skins i never eat,
mummy ribbons coiled up,
outlines in chalk of my body orbit
lengthening with each pass
of rotten lettuce and cloudy nimbus,
sour milk gone grand,
superfluous trajectory
scrape-arcing toward the can

is this what Eliot meant
by the waist, it grows
from when I starved, you remind me
of motel holidays spent left alone
when i'd haul ass down the buffet,
or the pits and skins of a Fresno orangery
where a farmer chased me off,
his fork was ringing
the citrus in my pants,
but thievery took the juice out,
they rotted in my cellar
and karma is revenging
the skinny shores of Africa.

to have bitten off the batter
with a smile to have squeezed
my buttocks in a ball,
to drag my pillows past your head,
my shadow is houses and houses tomorrow
i'm passing to make rooms,
the carrots measured out in spoons,
we'll box them for later,
I am passing
I dared eat
a peach and though my trousers
and my bottoms are rolled
into each, i'm failing in my folds,
the old and the mold are bold.

you knotted my pants on
the line and soon you'll cable
they're throttled and ten pounds
of ocean when soaking,
hemming my shoes away,
my belly is getting there first,
and my brown belt is doing
a thing all its own.

hand me the overalls would you
handling me in overalls
I'm not fitting in this
fitting isn't it
the bottom has a flap,
you make my stomach just
fell out.









Scott Wichmann

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