GAS Catfish McDaris, Featured Poet

Catfish McDaris is an aging New Mexican living near Milwaukee. He has four walls, a ceiling, heat, food, a woman, one cat, a daughter, a typing machine, and a mailbox. That’s enough for him. He writes for himself and sometimes he gets lucky and someone publishes his words. He remains his biggest fan. He’s been sliding in the shadows of the small press for 30 years. Catfish McDaris won the Thelonius Monk Award. His work is at the Special Archives Collection at Marquette University in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. He is listed in Wikipedia. His ancestors were related to Wilma Mankiller from the Cherokee Nation. He’s on vacation from selling wigs in a dangerous neighborhood in Milwaukee. Van Gogh and Catfish were both born in ’53 and Vincent died on his birthday July 29^th. Cat’s hometown is Clovis, New Mexico, Gauguin’s father and son were named Clovis.

The Man That Brought a Singing Fat Lady and a Violin to a Gunfight

Of all that is written I only love what is written in blood. Nietzsche

 

Surrounded by dead guardian angels

listening to: The Mephistopheles of

Los Angeles by Marilyn Manson

 

Warming hands and face above a hell

fire in a 55-gallon barrel dreaming of

dancing with a senorita in Guadalajara

 

Palm trees figs and dates in Damascus

driving Thunderbirds through a sequoia

and zebras and swallowtails in the Mojave

 

Shackled by my years, gravity sucking

my energy, the sky, and ceilings piss

on my head, the walls yawn in boredom,

Nobody laughs at the ugly mirror, guns

mean noise and chaos, death should be up

close and personal with a lovely serenade.