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Catfish McDaris

 Flying Dogs 

Sangfroid Blues

Picasso's

Skid

marks

Catfish McDaris has been active in the small press world for 25 years. He shot howitzers 3 years in the army and used to fish and hunt as a boy in New Mexico. Sometimes he goes down to Lake Michigan and feeds seagulls and dreams of mountain horses. He’s working in a wig shop in a high crime area of Milwaukee.

 

Sleeping with the Fish. New and collected works of poetry and prose is out right now!

http://www.amazon.com/Sleeping-With-Fish-

 

She went down on him

like an Otis elevator,

with a butt like no

tomorrow, he pulled the

 

Pin on the meat grenade,

people in Spanish Harlem and

Hell’s Kitchen and Chinatown

 

Want to hear the angels sing

and the devil scream and take all

your money and bullets and rum

 

Spaniard watched Juanita stop traffic

a drop dead gorgeous body, her

smile fed the hungry, but the

 

Dog is ice and fire and lives in

a birdhouse above a fire hydrant

waiting to learn how to fly.

Whiskey for my cat

cocaine for my dog

heroin for my turtle

give me strong coffee

 

I used to pull the train

on my vein, relax the

fist watch the blood

squirt in the syringe

 

Wait for the rush nod

like sex simply better

like love only superior

heaven hell Saturn

 

Tears from the New

Mexican sky, albino

flying bison, speaking

roadrunners, thumbing

 

On a hot summer day

standing on Route 66

when a Thunderbird of

pretty senoritas stops.

Spaniard checked into the Veteran’s

Hospital, he’d let the drink and drugs

take control, his mind was on a cliff

 

Everything he owned fit in a paper

bag, his Honorable Discharge, New

Testament from boot camp, a photo

 

Of his lady and their child, a few note

books of words he’d written, Spaniard

washed his only underwear in a sink

 

And spread them to dry on a radiator,

in the morning his 34 inch waist Fruit

of the Looms were all stretched to the

 

Point of splitting by this fat idiot in

the bed next to him, he was waiting for

Spaniard to explode, Spaniard was on

 

Him with snake like swiftness, he put

his finger in Fatty’s eye, “It would be

a damn shame to turn your brains to

 

Mush over some damn drawers. Your

bully days are over, comprende amigo?”

Spaniard hit him in the nose, it burst

 

Like a July fire hydrant in Harlem, he

ripped the stretched underwear from

the thief and threw them against the wall

they resembled a Picasso masterpiece.

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