Bruce Bond Improvs
1) p.7 Abyss of Birds for Ann

Bless You

my slurred Choo-Choo with the
sweeping and swirling wingspan
like a sword, swashbuckling with
the sharpness of an undeveloped tooth too
deep to clinch yet before the
Achoo!
disrupts the swaddled
comfort of silence. Surprise
stiffens the heart, a slight attack
expires with hoisted eyebrows.
Fingers grasp stale air and
all limbs outstretch and flail. A scrunch
face for hunger, car seats,
and/or allergies for her birth month
jump into an abominable throat
breathing with the tone of a

Clarinet being played for the first time.

2) p. 13 Confessions of a Music Box

Let it Be

grinds in my tight grasp
drunkenly self-taught, one-handed
winding with a thumb
circling right the same night
after its purchase at the Caen
Memorial, edified on genocides,
World War Two, broader
than just Germans and Jews.

The D-Day display held no more
than aged pencils with partial erasers,
paper, and coats, until Pont
Du Hoc exposed the bullets that remain
incased, buried in the cement
of barracks branded with the French
freedom figure of a capital
T under lapped by its lower case.

Call of Duty has been designated as
naïve.

3) p. 33 Rock

At the Mid-West Fight Club

You who witnessed the chaotic quarrel
at the rock quarry in Quinton, Minnesota
fell victim among the coral shaped gravel.
Where they stumbled into the rubble, the mosh
and slam dancing grew madder with each
stagger the faster they faltered. The fists in
waves, tumbled waist deep. Their babbles
spilled, not dapper nor spiff, but gross.

The tremolo of torture muffled
like an underwater oboe. Bubbles
popped sharp ceramic could be bricks
props for the fight in a field of the smitten
with a lust, a longing for the gore.

4) p. 37 Scar

Doc, This is Not Recursive

Present tense that is not now but
intensely presented as an
abstract
present somewhere between
there and then.

Rather
their check-ups are
fortunately in the future,
but the appointment is called
here.

Hearing tests where
the caller appoints their availability
to call out, not for, after the sound
checks out of the headphones. There,
heads are choked by phones for
the appointed who have made
the transfer here from there.

From comfort to cold and stale
Paper present for that then
when all decency is lost
as a present for waiting
in the room brim with sickness.

5) p. 38 Madam Zero

Miss Sal

Who tastes the darkness
that feeds her. She solemnly speaks
with rich red on her teeth
smudged like her reputation
that refuses to admit defeat,
retreat. A Civil War confederate
with schizophrenia inherited
from her mother/

Daughter of the moon with a temper
like our star boiling with a mania
for men ending always with depression,
slamming all windows and hope
for a husband.

Her mother matches
in every aspect not a role model
but a Mustang never broken,
sworn to swerve forever past all possible
yielding. Merge with hesitation
when Miss Sal sells her soul

6) p. 42 A Diet of Angels

Cirque de la Mer Should be Mar

Dolphins laugh odd, loud, stern
for anchovies not to waste outside
the water. San Diego’s world
of ocean hosts the show
Cirque de la Mer, a circus act
of leotards and those flexible
and flailing in the cove for the
splash zone bleachers amused by
the teasing of the captured with cultured
brown salty kelp replaced with cemented
gates.

One spiral slip and that was it.
Darla dashed down and out, over
the hold. Down with a swish of dirt,
and muddy carcass’, as fast as her tail
could up and down. A ‘V’ of light
ski’s above. One glance towards
all net, dunked with a slam back to
tricks and poor taste.

7) p. 49 Homage to the Ear
“You are the rumpled sail of a ship”

Hook, Line, Sink

You are the grime on Blackbeard’s poop

Deck, the screw of a lightning
welk. The spikes of a lace mupex
dug deep in shattered remnants
of your kind, who come and go,
a sonic clinking across as treasures
for tourists. Rare you are like a bloody
baby cow, expensive you will be
once desanded and unshelled.

Home once to a hermit who stranded you
because the introverted among the buried
booty need a change in buoyancy,
like the homeless hooker
who bums
lines and sinks at the beach.

8) p. 57 The Last Days of Jaco Pastorius

Em

E minor is two fingers squeezed
at the neck’s upper middle.
Sleepless barn owls pop smooth
riffs and tunes for the feasting on
steak tar-tar, but the slightly empty
will remain the tip jar,
the punny quote disregarded,
a feeble peal, chink, clang,
and that is all they offer
after overtaking the volume
of the amplifier’s dial periodically
turned clockwise as the value lacked
conversations boom all materialistic
like the bearded music maker will be
when offered a slot in today’s top
forty for forty days
listened to by only those who have lost
their white USB chord.

9) p. 62 Peal

Scoff

Floating but not bobbing, buoyant
everywhere the screaming of the mute
the judging of the jury peeling, stripping
all dignity left in bright tangerine neon
unified pantsuit uniform. Who knows
Elvis was obviously given the wrong
impression until he discovered shades
below a curled front, combed sides,
that bastilles are not just for parading
tanks and young French men in livery

who think Erica means American
and Heineken is Europe’s equivalent
to PBR. Alehouses don’t rock, but
they’ll land you in the jailhouse
if you decide to commute
across the border, hiccupping
and slurring racial indifferences.

10) p. 52 Homage to Georges Bizet

Seeing the Seine

Where Picasso defiled the Mona Lisa
among others, drowned to be found
later in piss, vomit, sewage of the ships
that pass through the scenic route.
I want that power, to be the most famous
of the contemporary for being an artist
regardless of my scale of morality.
To remain forever immortal
based upon a shape repeated,
sense made of nonsense
because blue means sad
red means mad
madly in love
with that which inspires
the scraps of what could be
back into the stage of the Seine.

The Radio Tree Corey Marks Improvs

 1) p. 5 The Radio Tree

Mud Under the Family Tree

Parents whine, then unwind
with a fishbowl atop a stem
of fired sand, filled, almost teeming
with blood red cabernet, because white
wine, more yellow in tint than lack of color,
goes best with fish or chicken. Pork
must be a red carnage then, not the other.
Poor pig forever segregated, prejudice by
mothers of the Middle East for rolling
in mud to cool and chewing the cud
renders the snorting squealers unclean
to cut up and cook. Unclean is public
rooms for resting your rump,
segregated by sex, previously
prejudice by skin color. The violent
pigs, much like parents, resort
to savage striking. Why?

Because I said so.

2) p. 8 A Brief Account of My Thirty-Third Year

Thank The Lord!

The year Jesus appeared to me in my potato
was followed by the year he greeted me

at my window, Christmas Carol style,
to warn of witchcraft in the homemade

Ouji, we used to summon the psychic
through nontoxic Crayola box

letters of the alphabet, yes, no,
and single digits slid to by a blue

blown glass heart forever lost,
never found, I once was eyeless

but now I see Jesus,
at my window, hover over

the scratching tree arm lit by
dull yellow-orange candle tops to black poles

He winks and warns clairvoyant
like a crow perched and cawing.

Acceptance of death is mandatory but
thank Jesus consistently for a happy ending.

3) p.10 Dumb Luck

Puppy Love

Lucky is/was a minx with a tail
and rabbit hind feet, orange striped
like his brother, Julius. My best friend
would drink from the porcelain potty,
eat Jade, our black labrador’s food,
and spoon with her. Mother had
Tubbees, another Lucky sibling, Dad had
Mama Kitty, AKA Angel (fallen and blind)
Max was shared by all of us, 6, but
my brother’s companion was not a cat.

Jade was big, black, beautimous, bold and grew
old, inside, not moved to be neglected
in the assumedly spider-ridden, clawed couch
matted with fur – the only seat in the cold,
cement-floored cellar. Forgotten
like all my high school shoeboxes shoved
with photos and notes of the “Stay Sweets.”

Four cats humanely placed in a society
of bars and strangers trying to find a match
suitable that hopefully may compare to each
their first love.

4) p. 15 The String

The Epoxy

pressures everyone’s
trust

by pretending off ten
why don’t you’s

a performance face
forward, blunt like you

do on clay tile under spotlight
slippage causing fail

Affixiation.
Two of too much – half-ass

with the strength of
a misunderstood pubert

and close to ants you’ve  been
told insistently that your beautiful

eyes must never roll. Back to
start:

if duct tape can’t remember its assigned
purpose to be everywhere and permanent

to everything it contacts except you

and your clothing, like that tie-dyed shirt

fingernails can now tap on
like a hobo’s bucket drum

a lying five minute dry
time with the precision of a perfect

fifty/fifty. Something used
from a crappy craftsmanship

will always be fucked

will never be the chosen
glue.

5) p. 23 Sleeper Lake Fire

Insomniac Like Water

Extinguish hair in wind’s way of lighting
cancer, aid the lung’s lifespan, don’t cheat
God’s chiseled masterpiece
but it’s cool and the tingles that
oxygen swindles. Do trees
get high off of our air supply?
This is the atmosphere of a dream
smothering as a descent
among the subconscious sever macaws
but colors subdued to trick
the sleeper, robbed from the tradition
of vivid. At least the alert have hope per
verse:
lyrics that choke and trap light within.

6) p. 37 The Black Bear at Closing

A Marred Mare

Bring forth the horse termed Bear
who withstands the band and abides
despite the lies of carrots. The right
paw sits crooked like a crutched,
cane walker, wrinkled and now a
Sitzpinkler. Oh my Glob Finn
would exhaust to the status of the
steed and his ribs, chained for
entertainment in the same
manner of the dapper who dine
on a live ape brain, skull cracked
unclosed, under the table, head
exposed.

Ralph-Lauren wearing
players of the polo, a game
for the ego. Hooves abused,
sores tangled under the
emaculated matted mane,
left unbraided, but made up
for the show until bloated
then shot, plotted soon replaced.

7) p. 41 Bell

Chicks

could coo and clamor clean a
path clear to clang like the
dismissal bell wrapped in cloth,
starched and marked
for the thirteenth birthday’s breakfast.

Chloe flocks down the steps, clearly
calling for attention with cast iron
like clogs on her could be feet
that once bolted too much to catch

too close to skeleton she cracks
now, like the starched cloth in the ice
box she swipes her sagging eye bags
to clean and hide her sickness

8) p. 45 To the Reader

To the Reader

What do you hope for, Love?

To have your name printed in any college
textbook, half a century rotted, coffin
interrupted by the roots of the green
that inhales what we humans exhale.

Do you wish on your eyelashes
for selfless help? To save those who do not
wish to save themselves from suffering
like that moment the retired from battle cry.

Do you aim to forget
that which plagues your photographs of
specific scents and places that drain all
senses, all the laughter that ended
with a betrayal of tears, only to be slammed
shut with anger, like being engulfed with
a requotable, rereadable novel.

9) p. 49 Little Bird

The Yellow Bird

A yellow bird accompanied by the white perched
far and the black of judgement greet the morning
when I realize this is the start of ever blues
melody. I know what the final bridge will look like:

An assertive pour piercing harder atop the trees.
The yellow bird twitching, eccentric, shaking
the rain from sight and feathers, too forceful for flight.
Like a gull, scheming a first degree slaughter.

The raven wastes time imagining authority,
claiming first dibs on the summer colored morsel.

Nevermore knows the pure’s strategy.

Seasonal depression writes the ending to this day.

10) p. 55 After the Shipwreck

Waves scribble the alphabet.

All vowels, not Latin, no Q’s
who stand alone, wading,
knee-deep in the wake of the sand
to the western Pacific, a passive
blue crystal and vividly new. Free
to roll without oil, crude contaminants,
remnants of the man-made machines
for faster, efficient, effortless manufacturing,
production of pollution. Power-starving
greed turns blue to green to earthy to worthy
of brown. The mother of the planet’s
expendabilities stripped for ease and disease.

Junkyard Quotes:

1)       Nicotine and black caffeine are manmade/natural laxatives.

2)       Please touch me like you work for the TSA

3)       Found random glitter on face with no previous known exposure

4)       Your Wii is not thirsty, it does not want orange juice.

5)       Universal language: sarcasm

6)       Dear Cupcakes,
The fact you cover yourself in icing really says something about your self-esteem.
Sincerely:
Muffins

7)       Punchline: Tulips on an organ

8)       Does Atlanta sleep or should I wake her up?

9)       Haunting in Connecticut 2: Ghosts of GEORGIA

10)   Kill mosquito on the wall: Leave the body to serve as warning to others.