The Poetry Marathon

I’m wearing a tiger mask

it is papier mache and peeling on the edges

I took great pains to sculpt the fangs

Today, I am the predator.

My prey wears a nice suit

and now a bewildered expression

as the plunger depresses

and the insulin hits his veins.

2 weeks ago I held J’s blue body

he was stiff and his wife was screaming

he couldn’t afford it, because suit had to make another billion

and he fell in the kitchen while I was out

He rolls over and screams

padding at his sore arm

and I look him in the eyes

I am the predator today.

I won’t look away.

Bleeding like a hanging pig

still wandering these wastes

sometimes forgetting what I’m searching for

everyone says they’re out there

in this bombed-out building

or just beyond that dune

underneath a steaming sewer grate

and sometimes their evidence

can be found in star arrangements

discarded newspaper text lining up to spell locations

absent ringing in the ears, footsteps from behind

and yet I’m still searching

my shirt is crimson

my pants are clay

and my shoes are filling.

Desolate is the small Southern town
battleground for powerful men
a warzone with their decision making
buildings in disarray and crime out of control
but at least we have a nice new stadium
where boys edging CTE can crash into each other
for momentary achievement before
they join the rest of us dying.

I’m on you like a trapdoor spider
but my hole is the mat
and I pull you down to me
because I’m not afraid of your weight
I hold you there
and inject my venom
by tightening myself like a snake
and using my leg to keep your head crushed down
I’m not after liquefied organs
just your spirit
and when you relax
my shin is in your neck
I wrap my hands on the other side
gabling with all my might
and crush your carotids
waiting on the tap
or a less than restful sleep.

Brakeslammer

Opening your third eye
but it’s like you used a knife
and the trips you took on shrooms
I didn’t know if you would come back from
your speech was garbled on the comedown
a swarm of jank syntax and lip jerks
you found God in the couch cushions
and tried every religion within a week

We used to watch gore videos
Cartel chainsaw executions
and chinese factory catastrophes
were the primary ones
and you told me about digging up
the bones of animals you buried
because you liked to watch them decompose

Now it’s crystals and namaste
you telling me how dark it all was
and how I fed on the tragic energy,
these blackened and jagged bits of smoke
like I was some kind of psychic vampire
but I remember a time you joined in
and we drained the world vicariously
together.

I gorilla’d
and he orangutan’d
into the toy aisle

we were seeking
transformers figures
to gawk at and place on the shelf

The orangutan loved them
and he set them around the tv with their guns
facing us and killing us forever

There was a young boy in the aisle too
looking at some Minecraft legos
and then up at us

As we gorilla’d
and orangutan’d
and made inappropriate jokes as adult men

and he ran off
whether from fear of apes
or realizing what he might become one day

I couldn’t say.

Darling,

I didn’t collapse the Silver Bridge
though I did try to collapse the walls around your heart
I chased your car that night because I was trying to ask for your phone number
but in retrospect I’m sure all you heard through the window was ‘eeeeeeeeeeeee’
and I stared you in the eyes because my therapist said I have to do that to talk to people
eye contact is essential, he says
I’m sorry I ruined your retinas
with my high-beam brakelight eyes
when I met you in your garden
again, scaring the shit out of you
for which I am also sorry
but babe, I flew a stolen sofa and TV to the TNT plant
and I rented a movie on sasquatch
just for us
please reconsider
becuase in the future, I predict we’ll be together

forever

Don’t leave me flyin’ and cryin’,

-Mothman

2. ‘Dadball’

Don’t you want to meet him?

Their line of questioning begins

when I tell them he left before I was born

there were so many things he could’ve taught me

like throwing these baseballs with good form

but, I explain, I’ve never had a problem

hurling them onto the roof above,

watching them roll and clang off of the gutter

then right into my glove.

1. ‘Crash’

The man was smoldering in the ditch

they had tried to put him out

he was a charcoal lump covered in white foam.

When they tried to get him in the bag

his skin sloughed off like that of baked chicken

and his half-skull head lolled.

His car was a desiccated metal husk

like what a robot insect might leave behind

folded into itself against a tree.

In the car next to me

a mother in vain

tried to stop her son from looking.

Her hand grazed his cheek

as she reached behind her seat

to cover his curious little eyes.

I looked at him

and gave a weak smile

wondering about the trauma he might face later.

He looked at me blankly,

then titled his head back

and pressed his open nostrils to the glass.

Hello all,

My name is Jarrod. I’m a SCAD grad, writer, and multimedia artist/harsh noise maker from Georgia.

I participated in the marathon last year. It was a great experience. The no-stop nature of the Marathon ensures that anxiety and procrastination can’t get in the way of writing. It’s go-go-go which means lots of work actually gets done for once. Deadlines, while terrifying, can be a writer’s best friend. Hour deadlines even more so. Self-judgment, wallowing in imposter syndrome, and paper crumbling are hard to do here. In the time it takes you to delete a poem or agonize over a sentence, the next one will be due. More often than not, I found that some of the ones I hated, that I posted to keep up, were ones that some people really liked. Another invaluable lesson here, that I think we’ll all learn or revisit, is that we aren’t the final say in whether what we created has value or not. As much as we’d love to scream-through-sans-serif font at our kind readers here, we can’t. Move on. There will be 13 more to do, and so on.

I’ll see you on the other side, friendos.

-Jarrod