Four Poems by Kai Warmoth

Spitting in God’s Eye
Gathering metal-cast heads of demagogues,
he wonders not if his hands should rather be stained
with the blood of berries, the oil of walnuts,
or whatever here was before the concrete rained.
Days turn to winters when hunting for change
and he treads softly, spear at rest
but mindful of it lest
he pricks before the exchange.
Green and white Carhartt unbuttoned at the breast,
or rather,
cannot be buttoned ‘cause of stabs to the chest
from the nights that phase into warm showers.
Nights that the bag was a little slick.
Nights that the boy was really an imitation.
“Man, s’what happens you buy from a fuckin’ spic.”
Lazarus-friends nod into the lamp,
fearing no tumble, no suffocation, no fall,
no disintegrating in a casket damp!
No shame, no lust, no virility at all!
Only a smug dalliance with the reality of death,
a brief intermission to quickly die,
so long as the civil servants are there to revive,
and steal back the ends of their breath.
What consequence left for taking the dive?
The past is for fatalities, barbiturates and meth.
God made the poppyseed, surely, but man?
he made heroin and then Narcan.
****

Head Honcho

Try as I do to attend to Spring Snow
It doesn’t arrest like her eyes
Carved with rouge and streaked with coal.
And elbows crook’t atop the melanoid throw
Push your face to the skyward glow.

So content with my meager tithes
Unnecessary even to demand a “because…”
It can go fast, yes, it can even go slow
It may even appear as if glimpsed from above
But O!, how these befogged eyes
Dilate! distend! take in no end of
Ēostre; your limbs! your sprigs! branch and bough!
Which coition will give us our tableau?

Arrayed in the yard where nobody cries,
We’ll take a photograph each time they grow.
****

(untitled #62)

A menially ill pastor doth sigh:
“Sentiment when sought was ne’er found
even when eyes were screwed to the ground.
Whither shadows in a land thirsty and dry?”

He smokes Lights; this only by compromise,
dashing them in gutter upon crashing of bell,
and hark! from other gutter the lushes rise,
and folks alight to crowd his steeple cell.
“God do not fault their retail-bred shamble,
or the disheartening lack of faith in my ramble.”
Try did he to preach over chime and squeal:
cell phones, sighs and suffocation of Selaphiel.
There still may have been an echoing flash,
where the headache gave its’ smirking a rest
and the gospel words seemed as if from his chest
before his baseness turns it to ash.
“O God forgive what is beyond repair:
their bored fucking, my drinking despair!”
****

Untitled poem about love and the limits of Eros within the metamodern context

Can the pier bleed into the ocean
Or does it then lose what defines it?
Do lamplit strolls, arm in arm, exist
In a land where all is ones and zeroes?
If not a binary be extant
Then whence the desire to be?
If not a division is feasible
Then why is the map not able to be exited?
Is there a threshold to naked sleep
Where the sheets find their seam and
The water finds its edge
Upon an embankment of skin
Running towards blue?
*******

Kai Edward Warmoth is a writer living in central Indiana. He has won no awards or accolades and works unenthusiastically in the service industry. A regular contributor to Terror House Magazine and ExPat Lit, he can be found shooting his mouth off on Twitter @kai_warmoth