THE OH MAMA RAHM SHIKAH POEMS
November 17 1996
Oh Mama Rahm Shikah
Your daughter, who is a dirty fat beggar,
a dirty queen,
brings another bushel of stinky roses,
bad poems and skunky weed.
Oh Mama Rahm Shikah, your daughter who
Stinks and is Ugly
dresses in rags like all the bad poets, stinky beggars.
But stinky Mama, for you
I tear my rotten rag-raiments aside
to reveal,
Oh Mama Rahm Shikah,
Plaited skeins of vermin
Glowing insects and
Corps of dancing fleas.
Ringworm, ticks and other burrowing parasites
make glorious religious tattoos.
They dance on this
Dirty beggar's bloated body
Making holy live sex tableaux
for you.
April 29 1999
Oh Mama Rahm Shikah
Three years ago I was
living in the sewer under your palace.
It made sense for me to
write ballads of ascension to you,
Holy Rancorous Mama,
from the sewers.
I can't even write the ballads now, and
what is a dirty, stinking poet if there aren't poems?
I'm just a dirty stinker.
Your ugly doggy girl
"Stinker" can't
keep even clean like the other girls
who stand
in soft sun
with their pretty, swinging hair.
Not me Momma. Always ugly.
Always uppity, always good
for a laugh. Call me "Stinker".
I will slice and solder every hand that touches me except
Your Divine Hand (other
hands are like rotten
tomatoes).
I could do
sex for you but who cares? People
act out sex all the time and
You don't need anything from me anyway.
Oh gigantic mother who is
benevolent but knows the uses of cruelty,
Tell me there is a river of effluent.
Tell me to go lie down in it.
Tell me to look up through the effluent,
at the trees
with their branches
arching over
and one dirty rag poet
will lie down in effluent until
my ham of a mouth softens
into flowers and air.
May 17 1999
Oh Mama Rahm Shikah, today
I tried on all my special robes to
immolate myself to you. This works because my
clothes don't fit. I want to pull them over sharp bones,
knife-bones. Bones it hurts to sit or sleep on.
I want to be as light as the dress I
slip over my body.
But today I am dense and sub-
stantial like a cake of lard or shit or anything
revolting and congealed.
You think it's okay. You like to see me bloody
kneed and bloody knuckled. You give me
fistfuls of gore to play with, fistfuls of blossoms-and-bees.
You think it's proper,
honest and respectful for me to play submission to you.
You don't think I'm being cute.
This dirty, fat, dumpy poet wearing
Robes that pinch and gape
Comes to you with nothing but submission
and asks for things in trade.
July 19 1999
Oh Mama Rahm Shikah
I have been wishing for
Lame and Hobbling things (nothing
new, the usual shit):
Sex-desire; Pig out parties with
cream cakes and
things double glazed; That I could make an
article so lovely that you would
kill yourself from jealousy with pills.
You will smile on me and
think I'm funny,
a funny dog for wishing this and
Oh Mama Rahm Shikah,
it's true. You've got
nothing to worry about.
It makes me sick that I am still striving
to be seen as precocious. I'll be
an old lady, kids will call at me
"blue hair, blue hair" when they pass me
in the road, and I will duck and bob, be
coy and ridiculous.
You, my great hope Oh Mama Rahm
Shikah,
are not coy, not ever.
January 12 2000
Oh Mama Rahm Shikah,
Things are steadily getting worse.
I've learned to cheat my way to you by spending money and
smoking heroin at night. Now I come upon you high and
heartless, like you've always been with me.
Your heartlessness ensured my loyalty.
I'm bored and sucky. Swollen,
sore and pucky. Artless. Hobbled
by sincerity.
Ready to pay you off in
Quarts and gallons.
Blood, tears, black bile or yellow,
Whatever it takes to get back into your sewers
The soft and spiny places,
the wet crawly places.
The loft.
Oh Mama Rahm Shikah I just have to tell you for redemption:
Of all the things I hate about this life (and I believe I
hate a specially large proportion) I hate myself the most.
I represent myself so poorly!
I shoplift. Much worse, I get caught shoplifting.
I barf on purpose at feminist potlucks. I shoplift
at feminist potlucks. I look
in the medicine chest at
every home I visit and I
pinch from every mood-amending bottle.
I'm an asshole and when I'm
not being an asshole it's the drugs talking.