Imagine: You Are Here

     poem and art by Guy Kettelhack

How many breeding bleeding layers
are there in this city’s skin?—
some operative—some discarded

and unpardonable: this half-moribund,
half-breathing porous mesh
of spin and sin and blunt intransigence

and subtle residue—this vast organic
stew which seeps into your thought
and flesh to underscore its intimate

hegemony—its power over you—
in all its multifariously kinky funky
sweat—its threat to all complacency—

this godless naked kickass punk of soul
who struts in refutation of the least
idea that any sweet simplicity could

ever constitute the whole: this thing
that richly rhymes with muck and suck.
Imagine: you are here. What luck!

Guy Kettelhack has authored, co-authored or contributed to more than 30 nonfiction books (google him for most of the full panoply). His poetry has appeared in over 25 print and online journals, including Van Gogh’s Ear, Melic Review, New Pleiades, Malleable Jangle, WORM 33, Das Alchymist Poetry Review, the PK list, The Rose & Thorn, Heretics & Half-Lives, Desert Moon Review, Hiss Quarterly, Juked, Anon, Umbrella Journal, Mississippi Crow, and The Chimaera. Several of his poems have placed in the IBPC competition over the past few years. In April 2009 he began wedding his drawings to his poems—producing roughly one hybrid enterprise a day. Check them out here, if you'd like: http://guykettelhack.blogspot.com/.

He has the abundant good fortune to live in New York, the city of his heart.

© 2009 Guy Kettelhack