A Poem on My Escape from Planet Hokomish-17

So there were the arachnosyphiloids
piling up all around me like an angry city of
legs and hair and filth.
They had me cornered
those bastards!
Me with my recently amputated hand
(Why I ever had my hand amputated to put a deli meat slicer on I'll never know. I was young and impressionable, I suppose.)
and that hand hurt like hell.
A deli slicer puts a great deal of strain on the forearm
bones and muscles that you might not think about when
you're imagining slicing thin slices of ham
and shoving them straight into your piehole.
So I was in pain, and had a bit of an infection in that arm
which made my body hot and sort of smell bad
which is what made it so goddamn easy for
those arachnosyphiloids to chase me through
the sewers of Hokomish-17
an escape I've used many times to elude
my predators.

But back in the moment, the arachnosyphiloids
were
inching
ever
closer,
their fangs absolutely brimming with acid,
the floor sang with the sweet hiss of fluorescent, dripping acid,
and the knife-length barbs on their forelegs shined in the dark
like a feature film,
and I thought, "Fuck, this is finally it! I've finally double-
crossed the wrong goddamn pack of wild alien mutants!"
And still they inched and they inched until that acid was
close enough I could smell it and the reek of that horrible
drip was burning my nose and liquefying my lungs.

My fate was sealed.

But then the Dargon Patrol showed up and it seemed
the Dargons had it on authority to take me alive for junking their
Ambassadorial Deep Space cruiser on that whores and
drinking
binge I took to Shelf Cluster out beyond the plasmoid nebula
and so in a flash of light, the battle was on
Dargons versus Arachnosyphiloids
like something straight out of a goddamn
Buck Rogers
(only I wouldn't encounter the works of Buck Rogers for some 14 million years so forgive me the anachronism, please)
Despite my bacon being on the line, I really enjoyed watching this battle
these two foes were evenly matched as fuck!

It was barb slash and acid flick against flash-saw and plasma drillers
it was arachnosyphiloid mass feeding frenzy attack versus Dargon Annihilators piling up one
after the other to separate the arachnosyphiloids at their joints like they were
preassembled in a factory and toss the pieces into a pile like it was firewood.

Despite my urge to grab a bag of popcorn and
watch this war of the ages go down,
reality sunk in . . . no matter who won it was going to be my ass!
So, with nothing but self-preservation on my mind,
I took my
deli slicer hand
and just sort of dissolved into the darkness,
remembering
that I had a plasma warp field ignitor stuffed up my ass.
With a quick drop of the knickers, a turn, a twist of the ass, and bit of a grunt,
I had the plasma warp field ignitor out and thrumming
(fetidly)
in my hand, gearing up for a jump.
When it reached its green-blue finale, I burst it against the floor under me where
gravity suddenly disappeared and I was sucked into a wormhole and thrown
13,000 years into the past and nigh halfway across the universe
and into a sandpit filled with Roving Clapctractons with their
grisely faces and their heavy claws snapping the night air all around me.

The Truth

I've seen the way you slurp that ice cream cone, baby.
Now why don't you go somewhere else?
You're making me sick.

Thoughts on the Inequities of Life and a Vague Semblance of Happiness Eked Out Over Millenia on this Goddamn Planet

Life
is
a
goddamn
sinkhole.

Hot Ham Sandwich

Decent

What does it take to be a decent person?
No, seriously . . . I'm asking
because I haven't met
a single damn
decent person
yet.
And
I've lived
a long, long time.

'Tis of Thee

The Mexican Place

Hey kid
with the big fucking mouth,
and the perpetually sweaty hairline,
why don't you shut the hell up,
so the rest of us can sleep?

And how about the next time your
daddy has you for weekend visitation,
and he takes you to the Mexican place
you supposedly like so much,
how about you not act like a red-faced
little shit and act your age?

Thrice Frice Bice

I have a pile of miniature elbows
in my face,
and when I come to and begin
to relish your presence in my
heart attack,
I will sing a song of "Sick Spence,"
that serial killing singing frog
from three towns over,
over there,
where I see the sky is falling
and the world is falling apart.

Goddamn, I'm sad.

Buffalo Gnats

I've got a bunch of tiny bulldozers
with each of your little buffalo gnat names
on them.

I Don't Know Kind Words

How am I supposed to take that
seriously? I am, after all, an
invincible ass-kicking robot pirate,
and there's no arguing with that.

My words are fists!
And my ideas are shards of plastic
sharpened and drizzled with a
doughnut glazing of
epic proportions!

Argyria

You sounded like the name of a beautiful girl,
Argyria, but then you turned my skin purple
as the sunlight skinted off the silver deposits
in the molecular structure of my skin.

Slowly, then more quickly, I started to die,
Argyria, you stole my life away. Colloidal
silver, they said, was the cause as my
extremities began to twitch and my headaches
took me deep into hallucinatory battles
with demons of the netherworld.

Argyria, you were the cause of my
enzymes being suppressed

Suddenly, Over a P-930 Form

Dale finally admits that his kids are not the problem.

Grieving, Rolf

There was that poor kid named Rolf.
Lived just down the street from
here. His parents couldn't afford
him a bike, but he always
dreamed of riding.
One day, he stole a bike from
Dave Adams' garage
and walked it up to the top
of Rogers Hill so he
could ride down it like the devil
on flaming wheels.
He wiped out about halfway down
and bumped his head for good.

On Faulkner's Crumble and the Ensuing Tumble for Us All

I always used to laugh
when literary superheroes
sold out and started writing
scripts for Hollywood.

Take Faulkner, for example.
A damn good writer was he.

In one fell swoop, he sold
everything he'd spent a
lifetime building and
burned his entire
reputation to the ground for
a little money and fame.

I spoke with him once after
he started working for Howard Hawks.
He was drinking (of course),
and he said he could return to
Mississippi literally, but that
in his mind he'd left Mississippi for good
and that was the worst thing he'd ever done.

I just laughed then, not knowing what would
become of the literary world.

Nowadays, you can't get literature and greed
to stop copulating
in the public eye, not even if you squirt them
twixt their nethers with a firehose.
And there
aren't even any literary superheroes
left to let you down.

A Question Posed by William, the Thinker

Why are stupid people
always on the opposite
side of issues I support?

Bill, Tapeworm to the Stars 2

Oh geez, so it’s been awhile since I last posted. I have to tell you I’ve been having some trouble with my latest landlord, the Oscar-nominated actor Jake Gyllenhaal. He’s currently filming a new picture, Brothers, and the stress of shooting is hard on Jake. Shooting is apparently something Jake takes very seriously, and it’s always been incredibly hard on him. I’d heard this when I was living deep in his sister’s guts. Speaking of Maggie, let me just say, that girl is wack. She is not good living for a tapeworm. I’ve been around the block, and she’s just bad news. Her diet’s a mess, and she was drinking a ton of Crystal Light or something. That’s why I jumped ship and headed for her bro’s shit factory. It’s been pretty cool down here for a while, but then news of Heath Ledger (R.I.P) got him down. He wasn’t eating much for awhile. These two got to be pretty good friends, and I know Heath’s passing was difficult for Jake.

At any rate, I’m not here to talk to you about Jake Gyllenhaal or Heath Ledger. I’m here to tell you about the year 2000. Things were going well for me. As I mentioned previously, I’d been tunneling around in Anthony Bourdain for awhile. Then, one night I saw the perfect opportunity to climb the tapeworm ladder. Shania Twain just happened to drop in at Tony’s restaurant, Brasserie Les Halles. Well, at the time Shania Twain was the shit, and I wanted to be a part of her shit. So, I jumped shit, so to speak.

Living in Shania Twain was pretty sweet for awhile. She was on a break from her career. We spent a lot of time traveling. I really got to know Shania. The real Shania, not the crossover sellout that her record people were pushing her as. She even wanted me to call her Eilleen, her birth name, which I gladly did. She is a very real, lovable person down deep. It’s that damn recording industry that makes people look like assholes. And I should know . . . I’ve seen plenty.

So, after about a year together, Shania decided to get back into the studio and start recording a new album. I was all for that, but I said, “Shania, why don’t you do what you want to do?” She tried. She dumped her manager and felt she'd done the right thing. She was going to get back to her roots. Well, you never know who you can trust in this business, and her new management company Qprime was even worse than her previous. They wanted to really push the crossover queen angle, and this really sent Shania into a downward spiral emotionally.

She did as they beckoned and began to fall apart spiritually, emotionally, and physically, too. As her diet got out of control, I started to get sickly. I knew I couldn’t go on like this any longer, so I decided to move on. I’ll always remember my time with Eilleen fondly, but a tapeworm’s gotta eat.

Did I fall in love with Eilleen? I think I did. In fact, I know I did, and I’m going to share something with you that I’ve never shared with anyone in my life. When I left Shania’s lower GI, she was in the process of writing songs for her 2002 album Up!. She was stuck. Totally blocked as a songwriter. She was not eating for days at a time. Drinking very little. She’d stopped talking to me, and I just couldn’t live in those conditions any longer. Before I left, though, I wrote down for her a song that I had written 6 months or so earlier about our blossoming relationship. That song was “I’m Gonna Getcha Good!” You might remember it. It was the number 1 single on that album. It hurt me every time I heard that song to know how wrong things had gone between me and Shania, but I was happy to see her get some final joy out of our time together.

I know a lot of you are thinking, "Yeah, right, a tapeworm that writes music," but it's true. I write these blog posts don't I? It may be hard to believe that a tapeworm can write lyrics, but just read some of these lines from the song and tell me they weren’t written by a tapeworm.

Don't wantcha for the weekend, don't wantcha for a night
I'm only interested if I can have you for life, yeah
Uh, I know I sound serious and baby I am
You're a fine piece of real estate, and I'm gonna get me some land

Thanks for reading. Hope to be back soon.

Bill

On Meredith's Realization

Full cup of coffee in hand and the sun shining brightly, it hit her.

You Cheating Dogs

Mallory wins the bet!

On a Long, Long, Long, Long Marriage

It's been one long 40 years.