THE MEAT MURDERERS By K. A.

Shott

Copyright WriteShott.com 2007

The Meat Murderers Index -President Meat Man -My Boy's Memorial Day -Terminus -Seeing Truth -Divorce -Accreditation of Authors for Children -Emersion -Founder and Fell -Frozen Meat -God in Mundane -I Know Nothing -Inextricability -A Boy's Memorial: Watercolor -Pounded Flesh -Self Mutilation -Memorial -Shock Collar -Some Things Can Not Be Forgiven--or Forgotten -the day i changed in the Son's eyes - Tongue Fight -Waking the Dead -War Bastard -War Sestina -Grinders of America United

President Meat Man How can blood-of-mind fill cracked heads without killing? Breaking eyes cry, "But it's only three dead soldiers..." Only three dead soldiers? 3 dead bodies! 3: sonsdaughtershusbandswivesbrotherssistersfathersmothersgrandsonsgranddaughtersgrand fathersgrandmothersunclesauntsfriendsgoodpeoplesaved souls? It's only three. . . of how many? Today we're at war. a war after the last war but before the next where new boys and girls will lie face-down on beaches; tides will wash them into dug-in shallow graves and they'll share the sand with crabs and fleas. Their metal rings, carbines, rifles & knives not-drawn, quietly rusting. Will those next three be one of mine? Will they be served up for wars made of bologna and peanut butter in a world whose stomach prefers meals of what's been ground down "No bones, please. No teeth. Pass the meat through the grinder again, make it soft enough to eat," while we feed our children

to the Sausage-Maker who encases them in the uniforms of the intestines of 3 dead soldiers lying on a beach. . .

. . . still, the crowd salute the Master-Butcher as he cages our children in bars on sleeves and makes them stick their fingers out for him to see bones pressed right to their scalpsif their flesh is ready to be fodder for his hungry machine.

My Boy's Memorial Day

A small boy's knee folded to his chest. Across-the-way: a newly-plowed cornfield.

He weeps, prays, head bowed over a square of black wet soil and gray dry soil. The marble reflects his father's name.

Yellow flowers, like buttercups under his buttery chin, sink where his feet sink.

Spring damp-grass leaves but miniscule depressions. Still, he crouches. Stalking his little mind for DeathHunter.

Hunting what had hunted his father and his father's father and him.

So he won't shake his mist from his tennis shoes. He wears dew like a soldier in order to inquire, of his mother...

why people have to die. His wings, bars, knocks he earns standing, attentively, watching his mother cry. Bootcamp-indoctrined-detainee

he's become an infant-man so that when he draws sixty-four colored crayons into one dank mass he understands its waxy smell...is the truth of dying.

Terminus My vacuous head is brimmed. With cotton fluffs adrift wind. Ache deep Within my cavernous olive pitted eye. It screws greening pulp into oil; dressing for brain-gray. The bink-bink-bink of epoxy ball'sbreaking wood reduced sawdust: nothing survives. Tangerine lollies stuck Kinder-Haar. Roots tear, tear, tear from somewhere dark below. Pulsing follicle bursting in mats brushed clean of symbiotic life. My vacuous head screams to screams rising from my unborn children's... I'm left a cavern (pitted prune mush) yet, with a touch, I'm blinking you DanderPuff out from my pressed-board eye.

Seeing Truth Eyes born through shaded light Particulates translucent truths dyed with brights. quivering hands incessantly

tap tap tapping keys chattering to vessels of eye by that were borne

through

particles of dogwood wafting down-filled air, like snow wearing cotton candy canvas slippers, yet floating like a ten-day old corpse rising from murk just to disappear

behind the sun's piercing arm. Still. . . ...DNA's never gone the sun is not an armament and dogs can gnaw doweled arms strung to hold cells togetherpotted roastsof farmers, spouses, children crying from eyes born through translucent truth.

Divorce Vacant eyestableaux; an effigy carved womb-sac; vision-swarmedgaggle uncoilingtaciturn... unspoken pact between her and the hunter. He,

who absconded life away, icon of Sturdy Oak (legacy: two-men) held eyes that quaked,

two egg yolks yelping escape from cacao-tainted-keg-choice: race or hacked life and her...merely maggot

or falcon.

Staring beyond her to the yew tree, he gawped her neck's nape, and quivered her blood. Talcumed flesh she'd caked, supplicated

her icon of faithpowder praying zinc could be his pupils floating seas of oat or Oboe whine while psalm-balming quagmires

of time passing between

his expressionlessness, his quacking lips, his recitation of an effigy of their life that could not be for naivety receding

a tadpole's tailas he waddled, and she trembled, while he walked to the visions of frogs, and men, and eyes without her reflection upon them.

Accreditation of Authors for Children Can their hands be so small as woodrats' and bats' claws to their pinkynails? As pink earthworm newborns?

Venison-truth: freckled, loosed? Barnacles, are they the measure of fit? To funnel, tunnel our babies... ...babies tiny sausages tipped with grimy nails wiping boogers on their pictured pages. Babies beluga-eyes swimming, fertile, ready & willing to be filled with pictures. Of what ...their digits seem too fragile to turn book pages. Words, entrusted to squash-brains, crafted by hands as large as paddlesas worn as ships from mind-slips qualifications must one have to till our children's Gray matter? Impartiality? Imperialism? Integrity? what salt is added to egg-scrambled meat and hashed into the potato-eyes of baby-feet that might prefer pepper?Hassenpfeffer? Vegan? Nothing? Pedophiles can be pedantic.

Rapists: rhapsodizingwhilesodomizing. Bestiality lends itself pastoral scenery. Psychopathology legitimizing, "If it's not chilling children aren't willing." to read? versions of elephants standing upon elephants one must startle, shock, titillate! one must penetrate, thrusting deep, into their Lil' Smoky minds; Ordered To:

choose or find... standing upon elephants of a world gone mad when one must be backgrounded ...before serving up... frenched fries yet can write in secrecy from scrutinizing eyes images (lies?) ...what we feed our children.

Emersion In a womb-warmed water I could not open my eyes sealed shut, my ears filled up; though I could breathe through the tip of my nose

my mouth remained. My knees bent cross--my ankles...little Buddha in a too-small space. My toes curled askew

(no place to stretch) numbed yet, I...comfortable. Mutedbut for my beating

heart. Beating...something... somewhere I could not know, but it's cadence. A screaming!

Then, screeching stormed my warm-crevice world leaptgazelle-pulsed running, springing, beating until I could no longer

distinguish two beatings only one...pulsing...thrum.

So I screamed...but drowned down the deep metal holes where CopperFace's eyes winked, its coppernose

sniffed, its mouth's pointed tongue licked until it had gulped my water-world.

I watched my nakedness surrounded by blues/yellows/whites... red so red it folded my purple into toes and tonguegray. I gasped! My breath knew I'd been born. I could hear men's voices, machines... and I was cold.

Founder and Fell the leaves are turning, dying right before my very eyes,

bled red faded into burnt oranges transformed into overripe banana-peel yellow.

one is falling into a crowd of boys-almost-turned men

who're turning limbs into blood-red eyes and their baby-banana skin splitting

like overripe oranges falling to the ground. bumper-crop of seedling finding ways

inside the silky folds of the Earth's crust.

Frozen Meat in one stream of jetted ice the night froze the wind and howled the window glass. Timbre, percussionthin against the slumbering corpses tucked tight in bed

where visions dreamed...filled heads... shuttered out the Spirit-Ghost (dead but risen) leaving the Christenedsleeping in decrepit flesh, rankrotten and long forgotten with frigid fingernails scraping their dirty nailbeds

deep within their sleeping heads: nothing can awaken dead flesh except the Spirit's labour of us. Into our Father's hands, exorcism of Vision's dream so out of the sand and created past placental viles; though thrust

dead, blind, deaf flailing through the wicked veil where pain is preferred to Him and filth

to His touch:

Still... The Spirit-Ghost is a basin, His handsAstringent; He cleans us, binds us, loosens

grime: our foul-celled minds. He eats away our cankers. And where He touches it is fresh pink-clean. It is dimply-sweet and we are...newborn. Babies cradled, sleeping, flittering our black eyes hoping to gaze on, greater than the universe, our Father's love.

God in Mundane Dog is licking pink baby stomach-skin. Boy is jumping frog legs from lily-Earth. Man is working, horse-strong. Object. Woman is birthing, bleeding, grieving life. World is turning: mixing Margarita Blender. Sky is crying ice. Sun pumps up and downlibido. Star-suns reach tinkle-fingers through toxic-dusts. God is holding His turmoiled speck. Believers praying. Poseurs praying Lost not praying (at least to The Living God). Still: the world is turning; the dog is licking; the man is working; the woman is birthing; and God's hands live in the core of all universes where He holds our skulls, bones of all time until the end of time,

as nothing but dustclods of dirtgrime

until He crushes us back to planetary soil so Salvation can shed filth. Risen, sitting with Him, and finallylistening.

I Know Nothing I have nothing to prove to anyone: I exist. I take up space and breathe. I have no knowledge worth fighting for or against--my ears haven't steaks

to fork. I have no substance or human need to feel. Right in a world-gone-wrong?

Corrections can't cover indelible inkit bleeds through making children squirming worms on hooks

praying grown-ups might learn truth doesn't come from grammar. There's no "gotten-right" to the correctly-flawed seeded deep as pine! I see you now! Arborist! Ozzy Wizard! I am not afraid of Curtains; I embrace my tableau rosa. It crushes Your spooked toes that "poof" air, Magician's trick: trichinosis because my nothing is everything. My fleeting punctuation proves once a voice sung for deafened cochlea with Word--clear as wheatringsthat clung mercurial winds and blew a solar system right. . .tchss.

Inextricability Of human threads through patched canvaspatched heads shrapnel, dirtatoms from the of all consciousness, throughout all timelatent rhizome of rips peace twined sinew. wire holding onto acts of ax-murder, fear. . . locomotion of our humanity being between two lands, with no chord to pull shards barreling into our great-grandchildren's souls that will yearn for reconciliation/forgiveness...RNA of decisions mass graves, fear. Fear's on the rails driven paradise and hell but the hammer of war, transgenerational minds of hearts with metal, Barbed/razor and hatchets, infested genome known

long-ago made, yet haunting. . . still drenching with blood-sweat, blood-bought rains for crops foddered foul and stained insides

of dyed memory unable to forget evil buried as deep inside as a virus. Mutating influenzawe jab needles into our children in hope of salvation we can not earn, will never deserve, and must beg for

A Boy's Memorial: Watercolor The pulp is wet to its fiber's fill stretched until it can be pulled. No more. To be fastened and glued

to the wood. Carved with wooded lead an image of a boy beneath: blue sky, upon green field beside stone gone gray over time chiseled: day life name... the pulp tears itself away from corners, base; even the sky tears from tensions...perhaps clouds...of a world

warring. Potholes of lightdark texture burst the cells of the boy's skull

because milling isn't plutonium mining and tree rings meter life.

Pounded Flesh He began big. Black. Draft with white Blazing. Jagged socks. He kicked, bit laid flatback his ears;

what a beautiful heavy head! He used his hooves...jaws...

he knew he could scare me off but bravery grows by water-days and he starved because I decided

to lie-in his manger-hay. I repulsed him. But then I felt him nuzzle his acquiescence saddened for I knew flesh

succumbed pride only...I mistook need for acceptance I touched his powerful neck

he clamped my inside-arm's soft skin between his sweet smelling teethlooking me straight:

eye-to-eye, brownpain-to-brownpain until I lay back.

Resuming, I watched pulsing dead grass pass down his throat, his quiet gesticulation.

In our quiescence I noticed down low his flank:

a weeping wound so old and torn it oozed purpleblack. Understanding, cradling my head in his manger, Death was feeding.

Self Mutilation Fingers bleed the keys. I could not stop ripping tips, cuticles, nails. I made soft flesh flay beside half-moons.

I let loose my canines. Deeper. Tore until just before the bleed, to the pink-tender sting-touch

and then I dug more. I waited for the tiny-wet crimson droplets to ooze from my crust-cracked self: magma DNA erupting from a weakening core.

My tongue, stained scarlet, sucked all that came from my deep: myself into me. Sacrificial sponge-flesh

to searing/grinding molars (my pillars of four decades' decay mended with asphalt) live to bridge bud to blood for they had to feed or starve or both.

Memorial My head is full of prickles I run my palm over points sharply poking through my scalp; they embed my cerebrum, cerebellum, cervical spine, like punji stakes of a long-ago time, penetrating...easily...ripping me to bleed because I pull outfor fearand too early and the tips haven't been cut. The way back up to skinned head possible only because my fingertips shred identity. My ink prints are scars of city streets of a city with no more guide than smudged incremental time: wounds fresher than collagen: towers: yet-fallen rubble and railed spiked metal teeth of a gaping mouth gone wide and dumb from palmed prickles and headspines.

Shock Collar

Cargo Van. Caged. Driven, the dog watches through his bars seeing only where he's been. Traveling. From Primal the puppy whines "escape." His quivered lips will a self-cry against voltage bound round his neck. It sizzle-crackles singes back without care for what the beast speaks: sadness, happiness, need...I exist. Collars silence, yet

BARK, BARK, BARK! ("envision beyond moving away") so the poor bastard braves... ...and braves ...and braves...

Some Things Can Not Be Forgiven.or Forgotten

Sun-spotted platypus painted on concrete sidewalks poured in celebration of liberation between colors, genders, and political affiliations in a nation masticating fat off its people

that sizzles as it drips, drips, drips onto the spit. a chemical-renditioned Donner Party. industry ripping flesh from our brothers' and sisters' limbs, marinating them in teratrogens,

a mangled barbeque of mutagenic DNA to the tune of tingy bells, --demanding service with a smile-and the glut of corporate bellies filling with warm, salted meals.

the day i changed in the Son's eyes i could never give that shame. His eyes/ that day--cataclysm changed: Son ashamed. i could never hate myself better than His pupils/ scorn. Was I too: short, fat, nothing. You forgot me (I thought); i hoped You'd still see Your responsibilities but You shrugged your shoulders as if i were passersby/bag-lady/drunk/heroine addict/whore.

Was i nothing but an ovum You once needed? I left your shadow. My anger froze shard-ice inside my hung-head. So I lynched Your umbilical cord. and...then... I crept a spider...or snake...or turtle to my never-again-home where I chipped crisped salt flakes from my scaly skin. I applied my Mother-face costume in time for the 3 pm bus and scattered

rocksalt on the sidewalk to melt my child who'd once, with moonbeam eyes and pudge-arms, snuggled singing, "My Sunshine! The Son Shines!" Our innocence jihaded...Baal Bomber. I tried not crying while your yellow bus exhaled you.

Tongue Fight VenomVeins! decay oozes taste buds wallowing in cayenne-taint and crab rolls dipped with hot sweet pepper! I'm overcome: Tourette's syndrome?

I'm miming fucks! Shits! Fiery stank and mouth poison, flame-thrown napalm on my jungle-home

where my monkey-family burns. My words their Earthen-vessel (once warm with honey-stick for them to gorge on) have grown a woman (formerly known as Mother)

Waking the Dead Trapped inside the parlour's window a dragonfly buzzed. "Neuropteran," I whispered. My mother-in-law huffed, "What?" "Nothing."

I never liked biological dissecting/ quadrisecting/ any-secting; I loved life too much to cut it.

My husband said that was why he fell in love with me Welkin, in that that day we reached for the same book, bookstore.

The covera woman, enceinteencircled with fleurs-de-lis. "Sem," I said. "Indeed," he replied, "Have you ever seen the Neva river?" "No, have you?" "No. But I've heard it's worth seeing..." It was a beginning much to his mother's chagrin.

I searched for bombazine, but mourning isn't what it used to be. I searched for Tormentil to make my own, but I know nothing of dyeing...only dying...

I settled for cotton. ...only, blue funeral-wear felt queer, Wyrd-like: like a rock dove for Orcus, or calamus for Matuta in lands-extinct...like Etruria. My husband...dead? Funny how I remembered his life after it ended...when? ...or failed... I'd forgotten

Lapiz Lazule...

he'd wanted to go to Europe, to Angoumois for cognac; to Calabria or Sicily for the thrill of being kidnapped. He wanted a real Kreutzer and he wanted to touch a mace.

But his "reins" failed fast. "Zaftig," our old-lady neighbor said. She brought Kreplach to the wake. His mother brought pickled smelt (claiming it his favorite) because she knew I hated it. I never was close to his mother. She was haute (her assets her insigne) I: imbrued working class. Dissonance underpinned the Dead's twenty-year marriage. She'd brought a pre-recorded flute. It tootled. I'd wanted bagpipes. He'd played bassoon in high school. "Fermata," I thought, "My Beloved!" and stared past the dragonfly

past the verdure beyond wondering if Oceania was as real as we'd dreamed. He swore we'd go when we got enough money, time off/sick leave. I wondered. "Does the screwworm thrive in Laogai? Perhaps it prefers the lepers on Molokai." I wondered if Moloch still lived there eating children with his fiery tongue

and if their ashes floated, papyraceous, to the beach

and if ashes could wrest seaweed utricles ...and did he breathe... before he reached the vault of Heaven.

War Bastard Ireland, you beckon. Iraq, I long for you. Bangladesh, India, Polynesia,

Vietnam...why am I so drawn wander wondering? Stereotypes/travelchannel/ wizened? I'll not find what I search in

land, people, mountains, deserts, oceans, dead seas. I am

a nomad-mind; I won't see my fiction.

My heart's discontent valve-pumps lust because I'm insane: I know what I know is a lie.

My mirror reflects columned Shermans, Panzers, German Mother/Sudantanland, Bohemia, Scandinavia: fathers selling Hitler:

I am the prodigy wondering why no country feels home.

My heart--dead crushed mush; I pulse

with dust atoms wrenched from Earth and my castle mere seasalt for

I am a bastard: nameless, claimless, elemental Troy.

I beg of you: free me from the egg sac, the womb, the semen from which I've been created.

War Sestina Getting rid of bodies, thousands of rotting bodies, is difficult to do without extreme measures and a loss of soul equaling the death toll. This slaughter takes its toll. It is an Everest-mountain of bodies where soldiers run upon blood-covered military boot soles, through rivers of not-dead-yet bodies. Fortification the justification. A measure of what we are called to do. "What do we do..." two freshly orphaned, bomb-deafened children.s cries toll "...what do we do. . . what do we do..." while the soldier measures rations of rice and bean. He keeps his mouth shut against the stench of rotting bodies. thousands of bodies filled with shells that voided their souls. "We're selling our immortal souls!" the preacher cried, "What are you all prepared to do?" "There are thousands of rotting bodies poisoning the water. The children have to drink! Think on that!" He watches the tolls drop into the offering plate; the parishioners attempt to save the church's body. The preacher smiles believing he knows the standard by which he'll be measured.

MEASURE SOUL? BODIES DO. TOLL the BODIES! We are creating thousands and thousands of bodies! Is death and rot the lot of our measure? What price will we pay for the mounting death toll? OUR SOULS MUST UNDO This barbaric creation of bodies.

I beg of youlook into your heart, your mind, your body and soul, ask what measures we must take to stop Death's toll risethere must be something we can do to stop building this world out of bodies.

Grinders of America United The most natural order, it seems to meif flesh is the fodder upon which sin feedsAnorexia is a great spirituality. For if one starves Fleisch,

as Jesus and Buddha did, does one stop to live? Perhaps mouths not stuffed up with shit-to-be

find voices, reasons, honesty-maybe treason--but it's truth instead of calories, conviction instead of omega oil, searching

deeper meanings than can be found on food labels. But then where does it leave the rest of us?

Pathetically stuffing tongues with whizzed food, sugar-coated-potato-crusted Ragued-Gulash? How fast do cells die in Gulag, Internment. . . at what concentration must our glucose be

to keep motors running, even if leaded?

Perhaps the Anorexics know what only those "in the know" know: food kills because no one: grows, butchers, gathers, prepares and everyone: drives-through, boned-skinned-packed, preserved to last, frozen, 10 yrs, don't care that plant's belts are non-discriminating-they shovel: fowl, bovine, canine, equine--all down the same line? because clocks tick twenty-four hour shifts every shitty day. And on Sunday do they run the pigs through and the anorexics too?