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 here> 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 which does wonders for the ego>, 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.


killer


your hips *do* things
while the bookshelf taunts
from the center of the room
like a stout little buddha, indomitable,
bold
where a line of little yellow
photographs showing men
you knew stuff me
full of ringers
who can't give you back,
so something is
dirt

the smile lines
sultry river deep
around your mouth,
i wonder how you clean
them out

and then i am
already moving
murder through the rack
is the little boy brain,
leaping from the drawers
the killer yanks,
ear murder
through the neck,
the real swelling goes:

your tummy rubs for good luck,
tomato breast flaps and alice moaning
while the wild woman
spins under the field,
her hands all arches,
eraser takes it off

the hunting knife swallows,
and murder is orange
pushing around an effigy
like underwear wings

she mentions sweat,
how her breasts are crying,
her bones are blue,
and the shaman's kit
comes liquid from the paddle

i like the way you curl up,
the way your body moves:
to the counter, the couch,
the old pregnant chair,
pleading with your mouse, biting

the finger clicks help
while i look off,
see your laundry,
their smells are leaving single file,
will signal when it's clean.

imagine your g-men crouched
on sideways hands,
sniffing behind your suicide,
a galaxy rubbing clean
and so my murder runs:

the mission burns
as shackled shrinking chorus girls go
aye
aye
aye

i cut holes in this picture
so you can fit

blinking slows and sleep sets in,
you sway and pan for a favorite verse
with fingers on the spine,
coloured rocks around your neck
flash of catch the
last breath, there,
the stare i know now
the light and go,
now you catstring or bone
to me,
with your

real

white


shirt











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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