"mistah kurtz" and others by Curtis Vandenbrand (Second Prize Winner of Joyce Marshall Hsia Memorial Poetry Prize)

mistah kurtz

i refuse to be
the next
rupi goddamn kaur.

i refuse to capitulate
to the fast-fiction
book-tok-bastardization
of the loving embrace
we know as language,

i refuse to allow
a pictographic “definition”
to “define” my allegory,
indefinable as the day
i was told to ascertain
consciousness,

i refuse to follow
the lies, mendacious
pornographs of our lexicon
derived for new york’s
“bestsellers”;
dime-a-dozen swill
to betray our very own
creative licenses for,

i refuse to permit
my brothers-in-arts
to relinquish creativity,
truth to the gaping maw
of soul-fucking
wall-street printing press
mother’s teat-suckling
avarice,

i refuse to commit
to the white-font-on-black-background
sin, laid nude on
still-drying cardstock
(half thickness) and
with a cutesy little abstract
pretending its pretensions,

i refuse.
O Brown! O Plath! O Domanski!
O Cohen’s restless soul,

give us the love we have lost
and right our lefts, handedness
be damned--
the guidance
of those who remember is
(the horror, the horror)
soon to be forgot.

the garden of otherworldly delights

monkeys bearing paradise-angel-haloes
scream in agony, their prehensile featherquills
vaingloriously declaring sentience.

“infinite typewriters,” they drone-
as the legions of cackling bastards
descend, winged as in oz, ullulating,
ignoramus brains pubescent to their elder
erectusesque counterparts.

cave paintings inform:
‘rage, rage against the dying of the light’
smeared as though india ink,
their half-butchered mandibles
crumble somewhere in a closet, yet
they are immortalized
in the annals of wikipedia.

an island of bipedal behemoths branches off.
they die in mere moments
of semicoherent bliss.

before last call: the internet-
lines of code encouraging an
ouroboros- the snake eating its own tail
as infinite cataclysms, thetabytes
of haemhorrage lead consciousness incarnate to
oblivion satisfactory.

the big bang is forgotten and
everything is hollow again.

soap opera

checkered-flag flaps in the wind
and the red velvet curtains close;
the fruitflies are
dizzying themselves in
a vortex of stagnant reverence
above the dishes piled Burj-Khalifa
high in my kitchen.

am i turning twenty-two
or fifteen again?
ask the
reefer smoke still steaming from
my hazed and confused cerebellum.
another year, another
pile of dishes stacking
like krazy-glued jenga blocks.

nightmares play daydreams
in my television mind, my cat’s
purrs in my ear turn the
static into an auditory hallucination.

how many days
have I rotted like this? it started when i
was freshly eighteen. two? three?
i haven’t taken a math class since
high school.
i cannot calculate
the millennia of dishes now
tumbling unceremoniously onto my floor.

class- missed
mind- lost
worshiping my audiovisual Deity,
perpetually tormenting my quicksand
brain into submission. de Niro waltzes
across my vision as McConaghuey
(how the hell is that name spelt)
announces the death toll in the Gaza strip
to an underaged cast of deaf ears.
the dishes are still dirty