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10/14/09

Ben Myers

Tastes Like Chicken: 6 Spam Poems


Ball Point Men

State-of-the-art sensors
laser-directed artillery shells
and hunger strikes for 114 days.

The chemicals could be at risk.
Young people are fighting and
dying over a failure to give evidence.

He saw things. He was aggressive.
He excelled in “immeasurable damage.”



Pablo Escobar

Prior to a local women’s volleyball game in Cuba
pre-organized by hooligan clubs in the area,
he apparently stored the gun inside a landmark
sea-line shore home then accused the US of pedantry.

Muddling through nimble moves in the financial markets
he used a great deal of capital. And so he broke the bank.
He was confident that he could still watch the game though
and wrote of this purpose in a letter with a knife on a child.



Coup D’etat

African tribes take these herbs all the time -
this is why they have such big cocks.

Bigger than the
federal reserve.

Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair called
the detention of the sailors “wrong and illegal.”



Retaliation Whisper

The lion emerges
bright and clean
to pace the wart house
under a twilight moon.

The twisted fronds of the overhang
silent in repose,
the birds in the trees
fear frozen like gargoyles;

an anaemic shadow crosses the window
drunk on cleaver dreams
and the hot wind
of this colonial savannah.

Behind him lies bloody body
parts dressed in khaki -
no more the landlord,
the new king growls



The Grandest Canyon

Smashed in the head from close range
blood pours from a flap in his scalp.

She screams like an air-raid, her
rope hands slippery with his blood.
A feminine echo against the canyon walls,
getting smaller and smaller and smaller -

below them another coyote joins the pack
collective snouts, jaws and teeth cocked to the air

as lizard lies laconically on a rock
waiting to see what will transpire.



No-One Knows Their Neighbours Any More

From the nearest house
a pungent smell of
rotting matter
came.





These poems are off-cuts from the author’s collection Spam Poems (Blackheath Books, 2008). Ben Myers next novel is forthcoming on Picador. www.benmyersmanoifletters.blogspot.com

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