When Dynamo left home he bottled his family
and tried selling them to Warner Brothers
for Dynamite.
Dynamo dated a woman who charged him for sex and raped
him so often his cock crawled with scabs
and spurted blood.
For Halloween Dynamo glued pumpkin seeds
to his naked body and went as
Johnny Pumpkin seed.
He was so embarrassed he made Margaret remove
his teeth his fingernails his hair and boil
a tub of pumpkin bisque.
Dynamo opened a morgue thinking it lucrative.
He collected every tear dropped
and sold them to father for
a dollar a tear.
This is the story of the ghost.
"I'm handing you this gun."
"What are you defending?"
"Between ghosts and subject matter," Father yelled
before beckoning Mother to the garage
bellowing, "choose glass or the rake!"
"Bellicose!" Mother yelled.
"Watching is harder than being," whispered Dynamo.
Margaret opened her journal confessing Dynamo.
Father filled an ice tray with tears and froze it.
Mother checked Margaret's vagina for loose change.
"This is how you check a bitch."
Dynamo worked nights attempting to recreate Lucy.
Dynamo darted room to room writing PROTAGONIST on
every wall so no one forgot. Mother made him brush his teeth
with piss. Margaret snuck into his room at night and tongued his
gums. Father smelled the foul stench of his sweaty buttocks.
Lucy called from a light socket, "You've come so close!"
Dynamo folded her panties into birds and placed his used
condoms between their beaks
and sent them off.
They poured the panting semen over fireflies
flickering nicks of licorice in neat streams.
"Isn't it a lovely night?"
Lucy returns phantasmagoric.
"I'm in love with her and there's nothing you can do about it!"
"I can build her a tiny box that expands and contracts
until her body shits and screams, clawing,
wailing, needing, vulnerably
seizing her life.
Try me."
"I'll drown her in the bath!"
Dynamo was never like the others.
Mother used to remind him of his loneliness.
"The rooster teaches everyone how to touch
themselves."
The cock says touch yourself, Margaret."
Margaret hesitated, shoving
Lucy's ponytail back between her legs.
"I didn't come laughing out of the womb, you know?"
Father removed his eyeballs at the very sight of Dynamo.
"We spend way too much money
on ocular restoration."
Margaret vomited into the cock-
tail sauce and is forced
to finish.
Mother milked her own tits. "Now we have plenty for you daddy."
Dynamo took up the violin
and could not keep his fingers off it.
Dynamo wanted to become a ventriloquist and traded
his violin for Charlie McCarthy.
When he realized his chest was hollow, he crawled inside
wept and fibrillated.
"I cannot wait to properly age, to crawl inside
the elderly and spasm with wisdom."
"What things we'll make them do, what people
they'll become with guns for bones."
Two stood parallel breached with liquor.
"I sharpened my teeth into apparitions."
"I've been looking for some new deadly
attacks and you've not yet earned my submission."
Father curdled in the corner as
Dynamo raised the bat.
Mother decomposed and Margaret found her way into a closet.
"Where is my complimentary altruist?" "Gone." "Gone where?"
Father wore a lampshade during the ceremony.
Dynamo and Lucy were married by the river
beside a crow and a turkey vulture.
When crow pecked at Lucy's heart
clear dead flesh, a slack and sultry organ.
"Kiss the bride," cried the turkey vulture.
"We have business with her bones."
Dynamo leaned fondly in, as Lucy's tongue
dragged him inside her,
where he waited in her bowels.
Joseph Cooper is currently writing in Buffalo, NY. He is the author of Autobiography of a Stutterer (BlazeVox 2007), TOUCH ME (BlazeVox 2009), Memory/Incision (Dusie 2007), from Autobiography of a Stutterer (Big Game Books 2007) ,and Insuring the Wicker Man Shadow Created Delusion co-authored with Jared Hayes (Hot Whiskey 2005). He is the 2009 winner of the Equinox Chapbook Award from Fact-Simile Editions. His work has appeared in numerous journals including The Ash Anthology, Breadcrumb Scabs, Counterexample poetics: Assemblage of Experimental Artistry, Bombay Gin, Brown Bagazine, Sentence: a Journal of Prose Poetics, Sex and Murder, Source Material: A Journal of Appropriated Text, and Sous Rature.