If Poets Could Fly They'd Be Pissing On You

Smog

We held hands in the polluted gloom
looks of love over our respirators
there's a sun out there
somewhere
the sun and the stars
know the way
if we can see them through
sheets of brown and gray

Smog, smog, beautiful smog
choke and belching sets you retching
gasping and rasping like The Covid Kid
night time afters
huffing up white cocaine
day time smog
above the fruited plain

I can't see you because of smog
all I see of you are signs
in the form of gray outlines
we can't film today because of smog
the mayor hung himself because of smog
dirty air has you crying
this grimy cloud has no silver lining

Andy Seven Ltd. · SMOG

Carrot In The Donkey's Eye

Well the wheels keep turning
engines never quit burning
stacks pumping steam
belching out toxic plumes of smoke
when the week's all done
what's left of your dreams

why ask why
it's the carrot in the donkey's eye

Where are my pennies from heaven
you can't sock it
how do you coin it
how do you get it
with hole's burning right through your pocket

why ask why
it's the carrot in the donkey's eye

If you want to feel like a common workhorse
come one come all
and join the exhausted workforce
but the devil has your back
cause you're whoring out for cash

why ask why
it's the carrot in the donkey's eye

Sing for your supper
and you pay the piper
all the well meaning creditors
all the smiling predators will make you a debtor
for the rest of your life

why ask why
it's the carrot in the donkey's eye

Andy Seven Ltd. · Carrot In The Donkey's Eye

Slumgullion

Four witches stirring up
a boiling cauldron
what's that smell
it stinks like hell
tastes like a bowl of old bouillabaisse and rotting onions
could only be slumgullion

Juliet lies dead
and all the birds have fled
the fish lay upside down
love's labour lost all around
spare the dagger childe it's all in fun
just eat the slumgullion

Willie the Shake
made a terrible mistake
as you like it well I don't
Portia and Banquo didn't
eat it for pleasure
they tried to shoot it measure for measure
just say no dear Hamnet son
pray don't try the slumgullion

Well the nights of midsummer
drive jaded pagans to plunder
Titania my Titania
surrendered to Oberon
just for a sip of his enchanted
slumgullion

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are still dead
but they’re luckier than Yorick
alas poor one just another shrunken head
Ophelia and Cordelia
had as much as they could stand
as Othello mainlined slumgullion
into the veins of his hands

(what a turn up for the books)

Andy Seven Ltd. · Slumgullion

All poems Copyright 2025, Andy Seven Ltd.

Sweet 65

Prowling on the sawdust is a naked boy cracking a whip. He has a pile of tornadic ink black hair draped all over his childlike face...like a samurai orphan. He cracks the whip like a lion tamer. There are no lions in the cage, but clocks. Half a dozen clocks. They angrily prowl the cage and he cracks the whip again. They sit up on their stools, roaring and screaming at him.

The clocks have wet fangs bared at him, they also have razor sharp claws with blood stained on them from scratching themselves. They want to tear away at him with time…ravage him with painful years and decades.

Once they lost the plot and got at him..a little lunge and he went a little deaf and went a little blind. In revenge, he not only cracked the whip but made contact to them, tearing off a minute hand here and there. Let them know who’s boss. Now they obey.

Before he was born his mother was in a jail cell pregnant, expecting him and a gypsy shared the cell with her. She told his mother that the boy was going to be the loudest most cacophonic creature ever born…he would burn up every room he walked into. Outside the cell were the sounds of people rioting, burning cars, pulling down monuments and breaking shop windows.

Insane Scorpio boy, intoxicated by the darkness, turning everything upside down and frightening every beauty and every beast in the forest. Look at him now, cracking his whip and taming the clocks that want to tear him up. They’ll never succeed. Sweet 65.

Reno, Tahoe, Vegas

Reno, Tahoe, Vegas
Buddha, Mohammed, Jesus
from the streets to the sheets
on my heels in my wheels
Reno, Tahoe, Vegas
black sheep to London, New York, and Paris

I went looking for America
but alas, she didn’t want me
no drugs in my jeans for her, you see
she was an opioid whore
gone to seed
sluttony, gluttony and selfish greed

Scarsdale to Scottsdale
Austin to Boston
give me your tired
give me your poor
so I can throw them in prison
that’ll teach them for sure

America cares
like a bandage at a beheading
the lizard eternally shedding
itself from the rest of the world
like a spoiled teenage girl

How can you call this
the land of the free
get me some drunks to spell “liberty”
line my jails with hobos and whores
white people lynching
round the Christmas tree

Stainless Steel Trees

STAINLESS STEEL TREES

I am cool, polished marble
i lie under stainless steel trees
around a lush green velvet lawn

Chameleons change to survive
changing to survive
too many destroying flesh
killing flesh
burning skin
and flesh
and bone
and hair

Change to survive
no more skin
no more flesh
no mare bone

So muuch killing
means nothing will ever
be the same

Change to survive
want to stay alive
like a chameleon
like a Rodin like a Henry Moore like a Michelangelo

I am cool, polished marble
smooth to the touch
frozen to the ends of time
with my stainless steel trees

Painting - The Big Game by Bernard Buffet.

What Is And What Should Never Be

"If you don't have the time to read, you don't have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that."
-Stephen King

While I understand that a gym isn't a gathering place for all persons and things intellectual there are times when I hear things that are a little too ridiculous to be believed. While I was flapping my pins on the thigh abductor I overheard some young guy talking to an older gent about his college courses.

"Yeah, I'm taking English at UCLA but I really want to write for movies and TV", the 22-year old crowed. "I like all kinds of movies and I know how to write for them". I guess everyone's entitled to their daydreams but nowhere in the conversation did this kid say what kind of books he read and what sort of novels he enjoyed. The entire realm of literature didn't come up once in the conversation. And he talked about becoming a writer.

Let's talk about the guys that wrote for the movies, the greats: Stirling Silliphant, Dalton Trumbo, Robert Towne, Rod Serling, Charles Brackett, to name a few. Did any of them say when they were young, "I want to write for the movies?" No, I'm pretty sure they dreamed of writing brilliant novels but somehow got roped into the screenwriting game. And I'll wager anything they all had extremely prodigious libraries full of books and spent all their leisure time reading them.

The scary part is when you ask a clueless guy like Gym Kid who his favorite writer is and he'll probably say "Hitchcock!" People like this are completely oblivious to the fact that if it weren't for the writing of Cornell Woolrich, Robert Bloch, Patricia Highsmith and Daphne Du Maurier, to name a few, there wouldn't even be anything for Mr. Hitchcock to film at all. He knew it, too: one of the first credits beginning each episode of his TV show names the writer of the story. Hitch even had a mystery magazine back in the day.

I once knew a hammerhead whose favorite mantra was, "I don't read books, I don't need books, I depend on my looks". What an asshole. Needless to say he now works in the motion picture industry.

Here's another story for you: Rebecca met a fast-talking blowhard who kept up about how he was going to write a novel and then write for the movies and went on and on about it and of course didn't divulge about what the hell he was writing.

"I couldn't stand him! You've already written two novels and this guy kept talking like he was King Shit just because he was starting some dumb novel he wouldn't talk about. I just wished he'd shut up!"
"I know how to shut him up", I said.
"How do you do that?"
"Ask him who's his favorite author", I smiled. "That always shuts them up".

One of my favorite mottoes is "In this place called Hell novels are written by people who don't read books". I'm not joking, either: we have friends who say, "I WROTE A BOOK ABOUT MY EXPERIENCES AS A STRIPPER IN SAN FRANCISCO". Okay, even if it's a memoir there needs to be plot development, character development (i.e. someone who started out as a rival becomes your best friend towards the second half of the book), fact checking, so on and so forth. And then what style is the book written in: Will it be funny sleaze like Bukowski, dark decadence like Hubert Selby Jr., erotically charged like Genet, what's your POV?

To say you want to be a writer without reading books is like saying you want to be Governor of California without knowing The Declaration of Independence (um, wait a minute, I just described Arnold Schwarzenegger, scratch that). It's like saying you want to play guitar without knowing who Les Paul, Hubert Sumlin, Chet Atkins or The Ventures are. Without an understanding of the history of your craft you're flying without a pilot's license, which means you'll crash and burn.

It also means your memoir of being a stripper in San Francisco will never be published. Read a fucking book. It'll probably change your life.

Illustrations by Rebecca Seven