The September Editor's Pick Poet is Anton Cancre

Please feel free to email Anton at: antoncancre@gmail.com

CAVEAT EMPTOR

“We all have a little Demon inside us,”
That’s what the withered, shrunken wretch told me.
No question of if but of how we use it:
random pairings of fist and beloved face,
midnight barroom ambushes of knuckle, knee and groin,
splashes of blood on alien nightstands,
or you can hold it inside, awaiting need.
The moment on your knees, screaming to heaven
while that most precious breast heaves and hitches
one
last
time.

A bit of me in the demon,
an opportunity for the justice Heaven refused.
The feeling of crushed skulls and torn ventricles.
Jackhammer heart. Open, careless bowels.
Throat ripped ragged from unheeded pleas.
The final moment of perfect realization and accounting.
An offering of blood for blood,
without mercy or hope for them or me.
Damned spanning time that dies tonight,
clotted with anguish and intestinal leakage.
All tabs paid in full upon return to the earth.

She promised.

CRAZY IN LOVE
(for Billie Holiday)

Crazy she calls me.
Sure I’m crazy.
Crazy in love, I say.

2 a.m. with the night clichéd around me like velvet
Nary a sound to be heard,
the unspoken curfew unbroken.
No fallen leaves to crackle,
no stray sticks snapping under foot;
sweet immaculate suburban heaven.

and

Oh,
what light through yonder window doesn’t break:
It may be the west, but my Juliet is still the Sun.
My love, my life there softly breathing lies,
the golden breast of Heaven’s smooth rise
and fall.
She dreams, my love, she dreams
and here I scheme, like Cyrano, to win her.

Dressed in absence, drunk on Absinthe,
reeking of chloroform and desperation,
surgical tubing, ball gags and
an old chair at hand.

Crazy she calls me
Sure I’m crazy.
Crazy in love, I say.

THE OLD SONG AND DANCE

She dances in the garden looking
for answers in stone etchings
where the only flowers planted
leave bitter fruit and sour flowers
and the sweet music drifting, sifting
up through the damp, musty soil
might just be grampa come back
with the truth or it may be a loose
groan working its way to the surface

THE EMPTY EYES OF WILLIAM SHATNER

I am the blackness, blankness
the roaming void of night
the absence of all
Unlogic, unreason, unlight
save the piercing shards jutting
from polished metal separator of flesh
bringer of the tide of crimson seas
my savior, my love

My love bleeds into the chasm,
tasting the life of sister and mother
friend and lover
eyes pried wide
mouth an abyss
spewing hisses and moans,
gurgles and pleas
howls that fall hallow on pale walls

Sharksoul hunt devour destroy consume
behind the mask,
none of this is real but me

Anton Cancre has probably gotten too big of a head for his own good anymore, what with warping the minds and hopes of youth and spitting his neuron-spatter at you. Feel free to stop by evisceratingpen.com to tell him his opinions are pure bunk. Maybe that will fix the issue.