Rent a Dream

The lady in the yellow

raincoat is naked underneath,

she showed me her treasures

It was like squirting me with

lighter fluid and setting my

heart and mind ablaze

Where are you going?

Where have you been?

Will you be my rent a queen?

We don’t have to be in love,

although it might be nice, let’s

walk into the darkness until

the sun devours the shadows.

Asleep in the Canyon of Love

Intense sheer walls painted hyacinth and saffron with brushstrokes of scarlet sulfur   Searching for silver spoon to make sotol and datura for sun tea and going on a magic trip   Dangerous peacocks in a raspberry sky, green sleeping ducks by the cattail forest and melodic stream   Rainbow cutthroat trout leaping for the gnat hatch, fat frogs burping, loons and cranes on stilts hunting   Thinking about the dancer at the Crazy Horse in Paris and how I’d stolen her a Gauguin, she asked me my name and I said, Scaramouche.

Beware of Po Po

Annoyed Starbuck’s customers were

trying to enjoy their morning coffee, but a young black man fell asleep in the sun on a park bench in their view   The man wasn’t homeless or stoned or bothering anyone, the yuppies got out their cell phones and complained, instead of buying him a cup of java   Three po po cars arrived, they hit the man with a baton, he raised his hands to protect his head and surrender and then they shot him fifteen times

This happened in April 2014 near Red Arrow Park in Milwaukee, it is now September and nobody has been charged, sometimes taking a nap could be fatal.

All You Want To Do

My desire is growing and throbbing and alive, I want you for my ice cream cone, my sushi smorgasbord, my velvet glove, my strawberry hills   I want to bury myself deep deep inside

you over and over and over, slow slow slow honey dripping, fast fast fast jack- hammer snake slither smooth silky soft   Quiver shiver thrill chill goose bumps, moan groan back up and hang on, I’ll be coming on strong and so will you, coming with you coming on on and on together   You can’t escape from my sword of love, my spear thrusting into your soul, we are one, we are together forever, we can not swallow our crazy love lust, it’s impossible.

I am the only one left in awe wondering why you and not me.

Heroes Never Wonder

The shadow soldiers stand at attention in the stone granite veteran’s graveyard in the sun

The Ballad of Tucumcari

Smoofy sold a mixture he called weed, he started with some high grade Mexican, breaking up all the shake, tops, seeds and stems, then he’d mix in about half catnip   He used a Mr. Coffee grinder on the stems

making them roll able, then he’d fill baggies with shake, stems, catnip, seeds, and three tops, his lids looked good and weighed one ounce   Smoofy was my best friend growing up, I was making a living off the five finger discount, there wasn’t much I hadn’t stolen, we were quite the rip-offs, when the cops took Smoofy   My entire world collapsed, darkness smothered the sun strangling the light from the sky, when I visited him in Santa Fe in prison, I asked him If he needed anything and he said, “Never trust   The candy man his treats will make your teeth

get rotten and fall out and beware of losing touch from not touching, women that cry from one eye, sometimes the happy ending is at the beginning.” Mcdar3@aol.com Catfish McDaris’ most infamous chapbook is Prying with Jack Micheline and Charles Bukowski. He’s done over 20 chaps in the last 25 years. He is an aging New Mexican living near Milwaukee. He has four walls, a ceiling, heat, food, a woman, a daughter, two cats, a typing machine, and a mailbox.