karl koweski, ficciones actuale/

Karl Koweski is a 34 year old displaced Chicagoan now living on top of a mountain in Alabama where he hangs on to a machinist job he can't stand. His latest chapbook, Industrial Strip, is available at www.covertpress.com. He writes a column, Observations of a Dumb Polack, at www.zygoteinmycoffee.com as ...

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... well as the column, Messages From The Exiled King of Poland, at www.epicrites.org.

As far as places to get a hold of me. I have a myspace page. www.myspace.com/karlkoweski
I'm a featured writer at www.epicrites.org
other than that, I've pretty much cut ties with every other poetry type organization. hope you're well.


Karl Koweski

“Obama’s The AntiChrist!” She Cried

Sundays in Alabama can be brutal for a guy like me with no interest in organized religion, crystal meth or professional football. I cared nothing for riding horses, tractors or logs pulled by ATVs. And I had no money to pursue the one thing in life that did bring me joy. That being strange women.

So the Sunday afternoon before the Presidential election found me lying on the couch torn between the sorrow of a refrigerator depleted of beer and the fleeting ecstasy of being away from the factory for an entire twenty four consecutive hours. I was vaguely aware of my wife inveighing me to wash dishes from the night before. I was in no mood to be inveighed.

I should have never quit the hard drugs. I see that now.

As is so often the case when there doesn’t seem to be enough insanity in my life, insanity comes walking through my trailer door.

“Obama’s the AntiChrist! Oh Lord! Obama’s the AntiChrist!” Lovella heralded the end times.

Her rant began somewhere near her trailer and hit second gear in the foyer of mine. Foyer being a fancy way of describing the five foot by five foot space directly entering the front door separating the kitchen from the living room.

“Everybody! Obama gets elected, he’s gonna destroy the world, y’all.”

Lovella, the second wife of my wife’s deceased father, stood trembling in what can only be described as god-fearing Armageddon lust.

The wife peeked out from the kitchen. I raised my head off the couch pillow. Our eyes met with dual telepathic messages. You deal with this shit. Lovella stood between us like a pendulum that had forgotten to take its medication, freeing it from the constraints of logic, physics, and the polite etiquette of knocking on a door before entering one’s aluminum domicile. The wife rushed into the safe haven of the bathroom in the time it took me to get a foot on the floor.

Lovella swept her jittery eyeballs in my direction. Her hands were empty of weaponry. At least that. Usually, when the brimstone began beating a hellfire cadence against her addled brain, first thing she’d do is arm herself before warning the citizenry of hillbilly row.

“He’s gonna legalize abortion,” she caterwauled. “There’s gonna be queers marrying in the streets. The world’s goin end in a rain of hellfire!”

The end of the world bullshit called to mind one of her earlier psychotic breaks with reality. The Y2K business. At the dawn of the new millennium when the computers, ill-equipped to handle a year beginning with “2" were prophesied to come to a screeching halt, dropping airplanes out of the sky and enabling queers to make a mockery out of the sacred vow of matrimony. We were still eating canned foods from the Y2K stockpile.

Seeing my kids cowering under the kitchen table as Lovella ranted put me on edge. So I decided to prick her jesus bubble with a couple barbs I like to refer to as truth and logic.

“All right, goddammit. First off, woman, abortion is legal.”

“No it ain’t neither. It ain’t ever right to kill a young’un fore it even got the chance to be borned proper.”

“Hell, I didn’t say it is right. Which it is. I just said it’s legal. Roe Vs. Wade mean anything to you?”

“It don’t mean squat to me cause I don’t read the Satanic Bible. My good Christian Bible says abortion ain’t right. Ain’t legal. Ain’t nothing but killin innocents.”

“Okay, fine. But don’t blame that on Obama. And as far as the gays... it’s a state decision whether or not to legalize gay marriage. Obama won’t have no say in it.”

“That Obama devil’s gonna bring the whole world to an end. You wait and see if he don’t, “ she hissed. “He’s gonna end the world with his Muslim idolatry. It says so in the Bible.”

“The Bible says Barack Obama’s gonna bring on the Apocalypse?” It seemed we’d had this conversation before. Only Britney Spears was the culprit. And before that it was home computers, www.com being the new number of the beast.

“What do you really know about him? He came out of nowhere like the beast rising from the pit.”

“Well... he’s a strong proponent for hope and change. And he says he’s gonna tax the rich more. And he graduated from Harvard Law.”

I felt my blood pressure inching up dangerously high for an off day. I tried to imagine myself as a balloon tied to a sphincter, floating above this shit.

“He doesn’t even salute the flag, y’all. Anyone voting for him ain’t no Christian at all and they’s goin straight to hell.”

“So you’re voting for McCain and that crazy bitch who thinks men and dinosaurs walked the earth together.”

Here she got to shaking and tremoring all over like she’d just been snakebit.

“No, I ain’t, neither. I ain’t registered.” She said.

“You think the AntiChrist is going to get voted in and you can’t be bothered to register and vote?”

“I don’t want no jury duty. Besides, I ain’t worried. I’m goin straight to heaven in the rapture, anyway. It’s them young’uns I’m worried about.”

I laid back against the couch cushions, glanced at my five year old son who thought Barack Obama was a Star Wars character. I couldn’t wait for the rapture. She’d leave behind enough canned goods and bullets to keep the Muslims at bay from our mountain strongholds for a hundred years. And I wouldn’t have to hear her doomsday threats parroted from her crazed Baptist preacher ever again. It’d be like heaven on earth.

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picture taken by Gregory Turner, the cover to my latest chapbook Casual Cruelty

Doug Draime Part 2

Here is the rest.-MDG

Someday I Will Write A Poem That Will Flood The World



And I will own all the
arks, boats, ships,
rafts, and canoes,
and tug boats, ferries,
all forms of water transportation.

People will have to come
to me for their means
of survival.

The stubborn and destitute ones
will drown in my poem
sinking to the bottom,
screeching like anchors on
rusty
chains.

The rest of humanity will plead
for cut-rate discounts. But fuck them,
I’ll make them pay out
the ass. No rainbows
this time.


------------------------------------------------------------------------

Protest Organizer



Century City in
1967, or 8, very stoned
to protest
Lyndon Johnson’s
speech. We were
among the
crowd the cops
were pushing back
and yelling at us
to cease and desist.
She took my hand
and placed it
between her legs
up her lily white
sun dress. When the
speech was over
she drove me home,
to my place on
Lexington in Hollywood.
And she jacked me
off and I came in her mouth.
When i finally got
outta the car, she was
insistent that I take not
one but two, Stop The War
t-shirts.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Jerry From 13th Street


There was the perpetual
Pall Mall cigarette
hanging from his mouth.
And he was always
picking on kids
smaller and younger
than him.
His wooden leg and
foot clanged and
rattled as
he walked. It had happened
when he was twelve,
trying to jump
into a boxcar
of a moving train. Two of
his friends had
made it, one chickened
out. Jerry miscalculated
his run and came up
short, reaching for the edge
of the boxcar’s
open door, and the motion
of the train pulled
him under. Somehow he was
able to keep one leg
free, with the rest of his body,
from slipping under the
steel wheels. Every kid
in the neighborhood
was afraid
of him, every kid but me.
To me he was just a pimpled-face
fat kid with a wooden leg.
One day he was coming
down the alley
with a couple of his friends. I was
fifteen, but already well over
6 feet and a solid 175 pounds.
He and his friends were
maybe sixteen, overweight,
and a couple of inches shorter.
They were all three smoking
as they passed..

Jerry sneered, flipping his Pall Mall
at me. It hit my t-shirt and
bounced to the ground. They
stopped and were laughing,
calling me a
dumb ass and a son-of-abitch.
I didn’t say a word, I just
quickly walked right up
into their faces. They were
startled and
took a step backwards.
My uncle had lost a leg in WW2
and I knew what the
weakest part
of a wooden leg was. I was an
arm’s distance away
from Jerry, who was
lighting another cigarette,
still sneering. I turned my body
slightly and kicked
his wooden knee.
He seemed to fall instantaneously,
tumbling over
to his left,
in a barrage of yelling and
clanging. His friend, who was
standing to the right
of him, took a step forward,
as if he was going
to take a punch at me. I swung
wildly, hitting him
somewhere around the
collarbone, and I was winding up
another, when he turned
and ran down the alley. The other
kid was faster,
passing his friend easily.

I watched them run
out of the alley to the sidewalk.
Jerry was still yelling and crying
on the ground, begging me
to help him up. I told him I wouldn’t
help him, but that I would
call his parents
when I got home. I left him laying
there crying, as I jumped
over the next door neighbor’s fence,
I walked across
their backyard into mine, went into
my house,
called Jerry’s parents and
told his mother that
he had had an accident and
was in the alley. My dad
overheard the conversation
and asked
what was going on.
I told him I had just kicked
the ass of Jerry from over
on 13th street. He laughed
and said it was
about time someone
cleaned that bastard’s plow.
That was the first time
I ever drank a beer
with my old man,
but not the last.


-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Watch Their Castles Tumble


Not everyone wants
To hear the truth

Though everyone gives
It enough lip service

“Just be honest with me, “
they’ll say, “tell me the truth.”

Their eyes oozing sincerity
And openness.

So, you tell them the truth
And watch their castles tumble.
--------------------------------------------------------------------



Coming Down From The Mountain Unenlightened


We trudged down the mountain path
to the water
like warriors beaten.
Our whiskey bottles empty,
all of our mescaline eaten.
Five days without bathing, we threw
ourselves, filthy
and stinking, clothes and all,
into the ocean.
The two girls stripping down to
their panties and bras.

Thomas claimed he saw
a flying saucer.
Lucy swore she had
a brush with Big Foot
on a rocky ridge above the jade cliffs.
But the rest of us
knew that mescaline
was the cause.
And we mixed our trips
with a few cold beers
to level them out a little.

I laid in a foot of water
staring up at the mountain,
thinking how normal everything appeared.
After five days of
psychedelic musings
and discussions of
astral projection, change shifting and time
travel, nothing in the world
looked any different
We dried ourselves in the sun and
headed down 101 for home, still unenlightened.