In your misty Drug addled mind this man And make no mistake He is a man Becomes a demon Skin shining Underbelly white Trench dwelling shark teeth Jaundice yellow as his eyes He hisses and spits and Holds you down and smiles With those yellow teeth And eyes
Do trench sharks have venom You ask? Yes. They have venom. They have words with venom. They have black bile brains that Make the words with the venom A perfect vintage the black bile And venom decanted perfectly The venomous words assembled Into vintner’s full bodied hate notes Cold cigarette ash-mouth bouquet And long squalid tongues That spit past the eviscerating Yellow teeth Into your nose Into your eyes
So you see and sense Nothing else but this But him. But him Doing this.
Gentle Jesus won’t help you Here, the venomous Thing Is un-compelled by prayer Or weeping Or reason Or kitten-voiced flattery.
You’ve tried.
You have to call The ugly gods instead:
The liver eaters The eyeball gouging Drunken deformed baby Making lineage grinding Gods more venomous Than him… And From under those Gods’ Sweaty, stinking Body-salt wings
I am an essayist and poet. My work has been rejected by some of the finest journals in America. Fortunately, it also gets accepted from time to time and has appeared in equally fine journals such as Word Riot, Inlandia, Brew City Magazine, and SageWoman, among others.. In 2002, I won the Academy of American Poets Prize for Vanderbilt University.
For no good reason, I possess an unnecessarily dark humor which is why being third generation California Inland Empirian delights me so. My gods are weird. I once won $350 for writing a smartassed essay on “why the wise use of water is important in my daily life”. I am undoubtedly the Greek god Hermes’ special snowflake. I’m pretty sure I got into college via a series of fortuitous clerical errors.
When I had to grow up and get a real job, I decided against it and stayed a writer. I have worked many odd—and I mean odd—jobs to support my habit: PR writer for country music hopefuls, resume massager, WalMart fitting room attendant and switchboard operator, and telephone psychic, just to name a few.
I am also albino. That's why my psychic gifts are so strong. I traded in my pigment for magical foresight, because that's how it works. It gets all technical. Trust me. That's totally how it works.
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M. N. Ashley 