Eleven poems from Zygote in my Coffee, print issue #6, Winter 2009  -- And yes I'm very happy to point out that I was the "Featured Poet" in that issue -- "Featured Poet" -- ahh that has a nice ring to it don't it?


fluorescent mangos

nothing was obvious to him.
nothing was clear.
the smell of rainwater, so much like lavender.
the taste of whiskey, so much like happiness.
how could he be this good-looking on the
outside and feel this bad
on this inside?
it just didn't make sense.
in the heart of the forest, surrounded
by nothing but pretty things,
how could he feel as bad as he felt?
nothing made sense.
nothing followed logically from anything else.
sitting pretty and alone in his spiffy apartment
surrounded by nothing but pretty things,
it would seem he should feel, well,
better, wouldn't one think it would
work out that way?
that wispy beard he was growing,
was starting to seem like a good idea.
he didn't know why, exactly.
but he decided to just let it grow.
might as well. meat on the
table, meat on his bones. where
was the logic? perhaps in the marrow,
there in the long calcium tubes
slimed with oil and
bits of salty red pepper.

--Carl Miller Daniels (This poem appeared in Zygote in my Coffee, print issue #6, Winter 2009.)



shopping list

in tofu heaven,
there's no half-realized visions
of perfection.
**
everything is tofu as far
as the eye can see.
**
there's never any hard questions in
tofu heaven.
everything's calm, quiet.
**
at night, though,
cute boys do sometimes run around naked
and spurt their cum from their big smooth shapely throbbing
dicks.
sometimes these cute boys even touch each other, but
always gently;
**
nobody hurries.
and the soft-textured
beige of tofu
lingers on.

--Carl Miller Daniels (This poem appeared in Zygote in my Coffee, print issue #6, Winter 2009.)



neighbors

the loud shrill clear wail of the bluegill fetishist
pierced the night.
the bluegill fetishist had aquariums full of bluegills
all over his house.
bluegills in the living room.
bluegills in the study.
bluegills in the bedrooms.
the bluegill fetishist is a cute sexy young man,
attuned to and intrigued by the workings of nature,
especially as epitomized by the beauty and
stockily gracious movements of the north american
bluegill, a sturdy fish with subdued colors
except for the blue spot on each of its gills.
the bluegill fetishist just liked the look
of the bluegills. liked it a lot.
as a cute sexy young man, he could have had
most any human company that he craved.
but the company that the bluegill fetishist craved
was that of bluegills.
aquaria bubbling gently, bluegills moving
gracefully within, the bluegill festishist often roves
from aquarium to aquarium during the night,
naked, his big smooth attractive dick engorged,
throbbing, and, he plays with his dick
in front of each tank, and, when
he finally cums, he makes quite a loud sound, hence...
yet again,
the loud shrill clear wail of the bluegill fetishist
pierced the night.
neighbors wink. some peek in the windows.
some just eat fishsticks right out of the package,
still frozen, like popsicles.

--Carl Miller Daniels (This poem appeared in Zygote in my Coffee, print issue #6, Winter 2009.)



good god snap out of it

he's shirtless, 18, tall,
and
his skin is so smooth that touching
it
is like touching
GREAT SEX
itself.
touching
his shoulder is like
touching an orgasm.
brass fittings have never felt this smooth.
that spot
in the middle of his back.
that spot, in
the middle of a sigh.

--Carl Miller Daniels (This poem appeared in Zygote in my Coffee, print issue #6, Winter 2009.)



just the thumbs

cute guys who writhe --
ah cute guys who writhe --
cute guys who really truly WRITHE,
cute guys who roll around naked
on top of the sheets and WRITHE,
really WRITHE, well, they are nothing short of
wonderful.  twisting and
turning and rolling and extending
and flexing and well, WRITHING,
god, they are HOT.
cute guys who strip off all
their clothes and writhe,
who roll around naked
and exhibit paroxysms of ecstasy,
who stretch & wriggle & contort themselves
with the pleasure
and passion of being cute and naked
and sexual and alive and sensate
and who writhe and writhe
and writhe as the world
turns slowly:  ah, cute guys who
writhe! ah! cute guys who really WRITHE,
and mean it! "contortion" doesn't
begin to describe what they do.
"extreme stretching and flexing" --
that doesn't do it justice either.
"twisting and turning and
displaying themselves passionately and
exuberantly" comes close. but
what these guys do is WRITHE. and
when you see them writhe, you'll
know that what you've seen is writhing, and
you'll know that you want to
see it again.  by the way,
people also writhe in
the grips of pain, instead of
in the throes of joy. the
similarity of facial gestures can be
unsettling, and, to some, it is
quite troubling.  saints.
ah the tears and screams of the saints.
echoing into the night,
old church walls
shedding their paint.

--Carl Miller Daniels (This poem appeared in Zygote in my Coffee, print issue #6, Winter 2009. It also appears in my book String Bean.)



equals

wild men often have a few good years, then burn
out like a flare.
and who's to say the goal should be longevity?
who's to say that quantity trumps quality?
maybe the wild men only ever wanted a few good
years, and that was enough for them.
everything else was just a bother, nothing
to be looked forward to.
yep, a few good years, and then
well, if not death, then
something like it.
just drifting in a haze,
coping with what's left.
those few good years, though, wow!
wild men wouldn't trade 'em for anything.
not even a signet ring with superman embedded
in the clear lacquered stone.

--Carl Miller Daniels (This poem appeared in Zygote in my Coffee, print issue #6, Winter 2009. Also, this poem, "equals" by me, Carl Miller Daniels, was first published in FUCK!, Vol. 11, No. 9, September 2008.)



notes on a nervous system

despair must become hope.
the yellow dredges of spent tea leaves
must become the power tablets of
meat-hungry vitamins.
when a sexy naked young man lies down
on his back with the specific purpose
of masturbation and cum-spurting foremost in his
sexed-up brain, those fingers of his get right to
work. there is no mystery or question.
these results are going to happen.
this load of cum will
be copiously spurted, and,
soon there will be another load
impatiently waiting its turn.
music fills the heavens with
its sweet sounds, mostly avian
in origin, though crickets and
locusts and even high-squeaky bats
make their own generous contributions.
some of those who listen wish that
everybody else would just the hell up.
others just want to pump up the volume,
vibrate the eardrums like aluminum pie
pans, dangling from strings
in the bright shiny sun.

--Carl Miller Daniels (This poem appeared in Zygote in my Coffee, print issue #6, Winter 2009. Did I mention I was the "Featured Poet" in that issue? Thought so... but it's just fun -- for me at least! -- to point that out again...)


presto change-o

slippery the slope to paradise.
slender the tender shanks of the lamb.
**
hey, when a good-looking sexy young man
is doing jumping-jacks naked, his dick
and balls bounce around as though
they had a life of their own.
**
when he's not naked, though, and
in repose, his dick and balls
don't bounce around, but they
do still behave as though they have
a life of their own: erection
and flacidity occur and
all stages of tumescence in between
occur seemingly at random, and
sometimes the scrotum contracts
real tight and pulls the balls
that it contains real close
to the base of that
good-looking sexy young man's dick.
**
sometimes that good-looking sexy young man
will do jumping jacks in front of
his mirror just to watch his dick
and balls bounce around.
**
by then he has usually gotten
so turned on that he just has
to jerk off, and proceeds to
do so.
**
he never ceases to be astonished
by the sight of his own dick
spurting cum, and by the sight
of the cum itself, so slippery
and slimy -- and odiferous, too, like
the scent of sexiness itself.
**
waiting by the gates of paradise,
his feet in little pools of cum,
he wrinkles up his nose,
and hopes that there will
be lambchops for dinner,
not yet conscious of
the pain of that sacrificial victim,
still unaware of the suffering of loss.

--Carl Miller Daniels (This poem appeared in Zygote in my Coffee, print issue #6, Winter 2009. I did mention that I was the "Featured Poet" in that particular issue, didn't I? Thought so... ahhh )



ceremony

the solemnity of the occasion was marred
only by the secret joy among sequestered members.
oh, everybody was polite, deferent, and
respectful, but, you just knew what
some of them were really thinking.
**
after, there were sandwiches, chicken legs,
and potato salad.
**
much later, there was booze, a lot of it, too.
most of the sincere frowned on the booze,
but they didn't have to know about it.
**
MUCH later, there was secret secret sex.
picture two tall lanky attractive naked young
men, sitting on the couch in front of
a pornographic movie, jerking one another off.
after, they sat there with cum all over
their sweet sexy tiny-nippled chests,
giggling, drunk, warm, and happy.
**
i mean, it's not like anybody had a
monopoly on answers, or even suggestions.
**
and, after a while, there
was a very nice sunrise, pink, with, like,
purple streaks of fibre
scrambled all through it. stunning,
really. almost mitochondrial, but not
quite that wet.

--Carl Miller Daniels (This poem appeared in Zygote in my Coffee, print issue #6, Winter 2009.)




weenies

migratory patterns of gregarious creatures amaze
and befuddle.  ducks, geese, starlings,
grackles. monarch butterflies.
blankets of life, settling
onto fields, or floating on ponds,  
or coating the branches and twigs
and bark of
well-placed trees. or hiding there,
resting, on their way, near-invisibility
achieved by green-feathered warblers and
ruby-throated hummingbirds.
biological miracles.
phenomenal zoological events.
gnus and water buffalo, traveling
toward water, rain, life.
people at the beach in july.
does that count?

--Carl Miller Daniels (This poem appeared in Zygote in my Coffee, print issue #6, Winter 2009.)



marble floors

the spartan aspects of the structure were only emphasized
by the presence of athletic young men being silently and mindlessly
fucked in the big white showerroom.
outside the walls of the structure, the
mediterranean was a dazzling blue.
seagulls screached. the waves lapped the sand.
inside the spartan structure, though,
everything was plain, stark, no frills of
any kind. after the fucking,
the athletic young men ran their laps in
the sky-lit atrium and
lifted their weights in the weight room
and lifted each other in the gymnasium.
positions were both supine and prone. with
sudden and yet unhurried bursts of pure vertical energy.
later that day, everyone ate in silence
in the light-less dining room,
as the sun descended into the sea; then,
it was off to their narrow thin-sheeted
cots, where no one slept alone,
and the snoring was almost music.

--Carl Miller Daniels (This poem -- the 11th and last of this particular group -- appeared in Zygote in my Coffee, print issue #6, Winter 2009. Yes, I think I already mentioned that I was the "Featured Poet" in the particular issue. If I didn't mention it, I surely meant to... teehee hee wheee I'm a bit buzzed now... ahhh yes.)