Fred Longworth, Poet

Fred Longworth owns an audio repair business in San Diego, and co-hosts the twice-monthly poetry reading at Twiggs Coffee & Tea. His work has recently appeared in hardcopy in Pearl, Spillway, California Quarterly, and Limestone Circle; and on-line at miller's pond, Slant, MiPo Zine, and Poetic Voices. In 2001, he published a small book of poems entitled Suicide Hotline. He is currently working on another volume entitled Insensitive Poems for Barbarians. Contact him at stereo1@cox.net.

In Memoriam

His poems were savaged by the critics
for using passive voice, for employing
multiple gerunds and prepositions in a single line,
and for that insult to the reader's aesthetic
exalted by the naive as clarity, and deplored
by the sophisticated as simplistic drivel
or prose. How they scoffed at his line
breaks! And pity the journal which printed
his essay "Making Virtue of Indirection -
The Feminization of American Poetry."

According to the detective's summary,
late Friday night, November 22nd,
person or persons unknown forced their way
into his studio and committed a literary
execution - every poem he'd ever written
shredded finer than fettuccini
and stuffed down his throat.
The coroner's report reads,
"Choked to death on his own words."

LOCKED IN A ROOM WITH NINETEEN EX-GIRLFRIENDS
FROM WHOM I PARTED BADLY

The women reach into their mouths, grasp their tongues.
Each stands over a bucket at room center
and wrings her tongue like a washrag.

Then they seize me, drag me to the bucket, dunk my head.
They expect a thrash of arms and legs, a spasm
of throat and lungs, a gurgled protest, perhaps a scream.

But no -- I expel my breath, hear bubbles breaking vitriol.
With a heave I suck the waters into my center.
Sometimes it's best to drown, and move on.

Listen!

That could be a possum, snuck in from the yard,
poking through the clutter that lies about her room.

That could be Carol, the live-in caregiver,
changing her diapers or turning her
so she won't develop bed sores.

But no - two men are here to stuff her
in a zipper bag for transport to the mortuary.
I hear the jangle of buckles, the creaking
of the hospital bed, the scrape
of skin against plastic.

Boom! Boom! Boom! Boom! Boom!

Sub-woofer thumping at 110 decibels,
the old Lincoln screeches past my house
on 91-octane testosterone.

Surely, this is the sound track
to one of those Hieronymus Bosch paintings
of Hell or Purgatory -
Satan on the bandstand, spinning
his backwards grooves, while sinners and infidels
writhe to the slap of flame against flesh.

I know what you're thinking.
Why don't they burn up and get it over with? --
transcendental body cindered down
to transcendental dust, soul fleeing
into darkness on a streak of light.

The boom-boom-boom u-turns at the corner
and returns, idles outside my window,
turns the volume up to max.
I will tell you this: Satan marinades the damned
in flame retardant. After all, the only thing
the dead are not allowed to do is die.

Gasm Up and Getm On the Road

Obsession with compression
reduces fuck to orgasm.

Orgasm, though brief,
beats norgasm hands down.

I like the word orgasm best
when it isn't written in my own hand.

Sextermination

He was drop-dead handsome,
and she, a flat-out ten;
but he'd grown tired of women,
and she, fed up with men.

They turned to high explosives
in search of sexual thrill.
He blew up girls with BOMBdoms;
her BAMpons made the kill.

The bars became depleted,
their partners few and rare.
In time, they were the only two
with genitals to spare.

The night they met each other,
it was an instant crush.
He thought of her as smithereens,
and she, of him, as mush.

If you know quantum physics,
then you won't think it weird.
The instant of their climax,
they flashed and disappeared.

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