Sean Kilpatrick


The Only Weapon Left

When blinking at Christ is another chore,
it helps to draw a laundry list of kneeling.

Dragging ass to kiss the grail, ichors
puddles our scalps, slows the procession.
Day pass in the ripple. Feminine lengths
metastasize. Hammocks swing their bones
in a thong of lichen, teasing until the crab
trees finally cater and weep a violence of fruit.

For all occasions in which we refuse to self-destruct,
let us then claim “accidents of judgment”, and,
pious, recall how magistrates house
their tans in the lipstick sundown.
these garden monuments liquefy diurnally,
holocaust shade waxed ear to ear.

“Take off,” jealous parties whisper
between gate slits, “that mosaic of genitalia.
I saw a girl yesterday whose shirt began
at her neck and ended at her collar bone.
But every torture goes out of fashion.”

Aerobics DVDs bombard skid row,
jutting lectures at the wine tangled
manes of the almost dead.
“You’re doing great!
Remember to check your pulse”.
Cackles enlighten the alleyway.
A pant leg is lifted
so the rats can crawl home.

Night after bed sick night,
a homecoming for every wrinkle,
grandmothers fumble out stains of granite.
We braid our kindness into their stretches,
paramedics glue more smiles on,
it is the only weapon left,
and it trigger’s greased.


First Date (from fuckscapes - first published in Ink Stains)

She came over
wearing just an umbrella

we shaved our heads
and rubbed them together

the sparks formed little swastikas
romance was in the air

I pinned back her clitoral
hood with six tooth picks

when she said uncle
I tied myself into a knot

I can break eggs
in ways you’d never think
she said

and I felt my tears
flow as the lights went

down and the newsreel
footage began
spinning
and spinning


Victim logy (Part 2 - The Fashionably Dead)

“Time destroys all things”
-Gasper Noe
I was delivered, hands at three and nine, a wrist-watch Christ,
guilty for Coca-Cola, the cock teaser billboards towering
over Projects nationwide, Mickey Mouse with all
his rectal sutures combed loose in the overhead
--that was the influence of my birth.

I am killed by shrugging post-dinner walks.
Stuck dead by a welfare influenza that perhaps, ironically,
I first sneezed. After all, how many times have
I been caught laying my silver elbows on the window
sighing my slurs at the newspaper?

It really pinches, muting one’s life to commerce.

On the sidewalk, as he pounds it in,
think what a miserable story I can peddle
like sympathy’s prostitute. I need this,
a new excuse for breathing. I will live from shoulder
to shoulder. Break down while using a tampon.
My friends, purpled by varicose gossip,
trays of cow like red mirrors in the kitchen,
fiddling loose their jealousies, and my husband,
a stronger dose needed to lift his eyes to mine,
share the pills--so I can stuff them into my wound,
but nothing will shrink me back to scale.

Tell the ambulance men to stop for coffee.

I have felt the future spend itself,
now I want to check my makeup.