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| Jay Passer |
Quartz Knocked
She urges me to love myself
She has crystals woven into her braids sitting cross legged naked toes wiggling like beautifully formed maggots
Crushed wine bottle glass pressed into my forehead temple and cheeks as I groggily scratch my list of menu items for the Last Supper into the wet sand
It’s cool in the winter mornings as subcompact time machines driverless and forlorn navigate the principality with neon strobings of purposelessness
On her rounds from the asylum to the ER to the county cellblock to the orchard the dewy meadow the silken creek and wellspring of elixirs
We met at the funeral
Of a noted intellectual
While prayers were chanted and cymbals crashed and offspring sacrificed and heads beaten to submission with peace pipes
“That’s a heavy crew, ex-cons junkie thugs, but they’re like family, y’know”
She read my palm in the backseat of the Uber as I massaged her ankles
“I trained with a troupe from
the Netherlands or was it Helsinki I always confuse airport security”
It was about coal and other
resources
Biometrics and the stool of carrier pigeons
I knew it wouldn’t last when the limousines came for her
I could faintly discern through the bulletproof glass
A harlequin inside with tiny embedded gemstones outlining her features in a dizzy blur of stop-action
“I believe the last on the
endangered species list has been abducted please will somebody call 911”
Invisibility Becomes Me
Telephone booth spattered with egg whites, bracken-thicket host to aborted abductions
or with the cat-lady’s clone drooling all over the coke mirror?
Why you being so opaque?
My asteroid is leaking Vulcan pus
Obsolescence pawned my wretched birthright’s sepulcher
I never knew a fire hydrant I didn’t want to awkwardly caress and mumble incantations to
a Parkinson's Casanova
Back up son take that rumpled fedora outa your pigeonhole
What about the extended cab of a dump truck
The grinding of the manifest
is hot
Hot oil sloshing in your customized knee-length Uggs
Anvils of lovely proportions exploding over teflon facial reconnaissance
Imported cheeses and tarantula feces wrapped in Damascus polystyrene
What’s a phone booth?
What’s a barber's chair?
What's a confessional?
Asks the fishnet slattern slit open at the seamstress’s
120 days of lockdown while bearded
infants hang from flagpoles leaking yuletide vape juice
Sharkskin maracas drowned in corroded carafes of industrial-grade absinthe
you could pump it into your gas tank and enter the Daytona 500
Earbud-stuffed bungholes blaring circa 1990 Slayer CDs
Ever done it in a walk-in freezer on crutches with swinging ribcages of sociopathic hermaphrodites
Ever crawl out of a swamp legless armless headless genderless only to be ignored by the concept of God favoring theme-park attraction sacrificial nutcrackers?
Shut it!
There's overflow and then there's rhetoric
Names being objectionable warnings assigned to minstrel deities flashing lawn dart dicks to prepubescent anemones
I said,
Invisibility becomes me like a gown
stitched from the cranial membranes of liquidated ballerinas
Shhh...
Go to sleep now
Forgone and forgotten in windowless
lower levels in leaderless disconnection in an infinite dream state within
which your only possession is a garden spade constructed of lemonade
At a certain point before the relief
of madness a foreigner will come to guide you through a maze of asymmetrical
construction and directionless junctures
To a spacious vault where your corporate sponsor has idealized the illusion to fit their various monarchies and looted museum collections
Ever done it on a Louis XV settee
before a priceless Caravaggio as dawn breeds fermented lice?
She has crystals woven into her braids sitting cross legged naked toes wiggling like beautifully formed maggots
Crushed wine bottle glass pressed into my forehead temple and cheeks as I groggily scratch my list of menu items for the Last Supper into the wet sand
It’s cool in the winter mornings as subcompact time machines driverless and forlorn navigate the principality with neon strobings of purposelessness
On her rounds from the asylum to the ER to the county cellblock to the orchard the dewy meadow the silken creek and wellspring of elixirs
Of a noted intellectual
While prayers were chanted and cymbals crashed and offspring sacrificed and heads beaten to submission with peace pipes
“That’s a heavy crew, ex-cons junkie thugs, but they’re like family, y’know”
She read my palm in the backseat of the Uber as I massaged her ankles
Biometrics and the stool of carrier pigeons
I knew it wouldn’t last when the limousines came for her
I could faintly discern through the bulletproof glass
A harlequin inside with tiny embedded gemstones outlining her features in a dizzy blur of stop-action
Invisibility Becomes Me
Telephone booth spattered with egg whites, bracken-thicket host to aborted abductions
or with the cat-lady’s clone drooling all over the coke mirror?
Why you being so opaque?
My asteroid is leaking Vulcan pus
Obsolescence pawned my wretched birthright’s sepulcher
I never knew a fire hydrant I didn’t want to awkwardly caress and mumble incantations to
a Parkinson's Casanova
Back up son take that rumpled fedora outa your pigeonhole
What about the extended cab of a dump truck
The grinding of the manifest
is hot
Hot oil sloshing in your customized knee-length Uggs
Anvils of lovely proportions exploding over teflon facial reconnaissance
Imported cheeses and tarantula feces wrapped in Damascus polystyrene
What’s a barber's chair?
What's a confessional?
Asks the fishnet slattern slit open at the seamstress’s
Sharkskin maracas drowned in corroded carafes of industrial-grade absinthe
you could pump it into your gas tank and enter the Daytona 500
Earbud-stuffed bungholes blaring circa 1990 Slayer CDs
Ever done it in a walk-in freezer on crutches with swinging ribcages of sociopathic hermaphrodites
Ever crawl out of a swamp legless armless headless genderless only to be ignored by the concept of God favoring theme-park attraction sacrificial nutcrackers?
There's overflow and then there's rhetoric
Names being objectionable warnings assigned to minstrel deities flashing lawn dart dicks to prepubescent anemones
Go to sleep now
To a spacious vault where your corporate sponsor has idealized the illusion to fit their various monarchies and looted museum collections
Bio
Jay Passer's poetry first appeared in Caliban magazine in 1988, alongside works by William S. Burroughs and Wanda Coleman. He is the author of fifteen collections of poetry and prose and has been included in several anthologies as well as print and online publications worldwide. His first novel, Squirrel, was released in 2022. A lifelong plebeian, Passer has labored as dishwasher, barista, line cook, housepainter, courier, warehouseman, bookseller, receptionist and mortician's apprentice. Originally a native of San Francisco, Passer currently resides in Los Angeles, California. His latest collection of poems, If Ghost Had Lips, was released in February of 2025 by Bottlecap Press.
