2 Poems

By Tempest Miller

Crash on the Bluff

Mary Ann and Paul were beheaded
in ritual sacrifice on the Michigan beach.
The killer was a Chinese motorcyclist with padded knees.
The killer, caught clear as crystal lakes on Closed Circuit,
was Rupert Crash of Hammersmith.
He said it was painless.
It’s painless and quiet to pork-shank a head.
They kick, they fight,
but it’s been painless since the 1860s.
Circular motion to prise off Mary Ann’s head,
with her boyfriend strewn far away like
airplane crash parts.
Crash in the bloody pigsty sand saying
he didn’t get the job.
Says, can’t she see she’s just history
with her boyfriend and her reputation.
But the Detective uncovers Crash staying in Hell’s Kitchen hotels,
sipping on coffee,
telling all the guests he’s a murderer,
that he killed a prison guard and escaped
and he’s taking some banger of a car to Mexico.

Crash denies killing the two teenagers
but says he saw them all over each other
in the beach toilets,
and Crash says they were mistreating billfish in the water
having tempted them with bread.
Crash says he saw what happened.
An unknown man had shot them, resting on the bluff
and came down with them dead
and severed their heads with ropes and a chainsaw
because he was on his break from work and was hungry
and deeply sexualised.

Detective says Crash is wanted in England
for pushing old men in front of trains.
And in Antwerp for affray.
Crash pushed men in front of trains at Milton Keynes Central.
He decided who and when via a primitive dice game he played on the platforms.
He had to be stoned to muffle the calls of
“no satiation until 2000 dead”
“until 2000 faces cracked”
“bruised”
“un-glued”.
Stoned in platform inclusive toilets
with Red Bulls down the U-bend.
Milton Keynes.
The warehouse, xeno city.
Crash is munching on the bloodbath intestines.
Crash is munching on its subterranean basin
covered in meat.
Crash is chained to the basin, on an urban greenspace bench.
Chain on his hand, ankle tag for prior crimes,
wearing a fresh-pressed and clean as scrubbed bone, white
fast-food worker shirt.
Dragging on a cigarette,
knocking knees, keeping a narrow gap between his knees,
filled with chronic vertigo.
He rolls the cigarette over his purple snake fangs.

2000 dead, 2000 dead
and more hurt.
Broken cheek bones held up by toilet brushes.
Crash has visions of CrossCountry rail trains cutting
off his genitals around Birmingham NS
and not stopping until Leeds.
It would be painless, Crash thinks.
Strangulation by the earthy intestines of the MK body politic.
He’s sure it’s all painless,
staring into an MK Central toilet mirror
and brushing his tongue over his moustache.

The Antwerp situation was via a travel exemption
approved by a bald, tall corrective officer
to visit an online girlfriend he had paid someone to pose as
in a gardening forum.
There, he hid behind bins smoking
as Dutch girls walked past in summer dresses.
He had a thing about wearing hi-vis jackets
his dead father had worn
as part of a Merc industrial park site team.
He wore them to make people think he was important.
To play despot.
To make the sweaty Belgian jogger stop jogging.
To say, “stop!”, and clench French teeth
and grab him by the scruff of the neck.

Now, Crash supposes extraditions will keep him semi-thrilled.

Junkyard Pope

The roads did burn when the Pope visited the garbage plant.
Rupert Crash was eaten by a waste compactor,
crushed between Nazi Decadent Art pieces.
The roads did burn
with a procession of coffins guided by blue-lights.
Flat grass, flat pavement, bin in a black gauze.
Burning, self-made entrepreneur stuffed down its sleeves.
How gorgeous you look with bin juice on your white-shirt.
Jogger on a still hillock, thin and latently sexual.
He stares down on the nation’s smouldering dump,
Crash’s face a blubbering orange mess,
deep red lines in his 14-year-old jowls
and forehead, medically restitched from alcohol blow-up too early
for his cranium to expand.
Duvet covers half a blue mattress.
Shirtless, pearl necklace.

The Pope sees the burning,
the stray dogs curled in the un-walled sinks.
Crash, the fat child, nose piercing.
Sit around all day, bare feet on grubby carpet.
Red lips and yellow teeth.
Bit of speed on the music magazine,
dog razor teeth. Jawbone queerer by the day.
Crash looks 50-years-old, drunk bastard.
He goes to raves with his head stitches
a kind of punk rock anvil.

The Pope, in whale-white robes, Papal toga,
says this is a delinquent place to bring him
in his open-roofed Italian Toyota.
But the riot flames warm him up,
drag him back from shivering, constipated Northampton
by his genius ankles.
Going over the white ring roads,
the car wash Rupert crunched his sternum in
until it went septic.
The single mothers in pink sweaters.
Rupert has a glass of bourbon under the pub window
and black dye shows under his ribs.
Eating fish fingers in the garbage tip.
Decadent blue polo shirt, scrambled egg down the breast pocket.

When he’s twenty-four, he’s got sickness handouts.
He gets on University Challenge as a Durham student.
But he’s a fat bastard with a vegetable sandwich.
And today, the Pope hates most his long hair,
and love his tasteless anti-atheism,
his bilge patina of spiritual fruit.
Rupert was preaching in the pub garden
saying “Go sin, boy. Go sin while you still can.
Put knitted blankets over yourself in the rubbish heap.
Roll fingers over a dirty spoon.”
Red screwdriver, church clock hands go forty times speed.

The Pope’s secretary is cast in LSD purple-green shade.
Put hands in pockets, you wreck.
Rupert: “What do you think, Papal authority?”
“Think: there’s blood marks under your neck.
Know sommut about that meself, Child.
In golden room, we kill each other for hours for blood sport,
it’s velvet everywhere.”
“For me it’s just poking gaps, prodding.
You know I’m sommut of an urban genius?
We’ve got this forever youth, vampirism these gens, you see?”
“I see, brother, I see.”
“And it’s for blood donation too. Blood donation on sand. They give cookies.
That brings me out of the woodwork.”
“I’m sure it does.”
“Why do you have a briefcase, Father?”
“Nuclear codes and showbiz.”
“Alright, well have a look around the urban park while you’re down.
I’m Rup by the way.
You know, in that park, a child killer built wood dens out of pine sticks?”
Crash omits certain things he wants to say
about the estates, the bricks around here.
He’s seeing everything in greyscale anyway.
Calvary may come, footpaths may feed risings and broken necks,
but the Papacy will still spread his arms, gleeful.
He will outlast Crash and his eldritch goat’s head
dyed green,
sucking on a rubbish skip megaphone.
Blood down everything.
There’s a Ripper in this junkyard,
loves murdering inanity,
demeaning corpses,
drinking gin with lime,
can’t work a day job.
Rupert’s dread prompts him to hang out here –
begging to be Ripped.
But never getting it.

 Tempest Miller is a writer from the UK. His work has appeared in Bruiser, Chiron Review, God’s Cruel Joke and elsewhere.