Cake Fight by Brett Evans

 

New Orleans poet Brett Evans shares the same star-crossed birthday with the New Orleans Saints. He waits to go in tandem with them "o'er the goalline". Poetry assuages the Sisyphian defeats in the meantime. His three full-length perfect-bound works of poetry are After School Session, Ready-to-Eat Individual (with Frank Sherlock), and Slosh Models. He is regular contributor to the blogs The Unday and Sisyphus Rox. Evans' works have been featured in many literary zines including YAWP: a Journal of Poetry & Art.

 

Cake Fight
for Bill Lavender

Damn this cake smells like something's on fire!
powered by ouija board font and tequila mockery
you, Bill, might be the hombre calling offsides
on Life, casting a Honey Island Swamp Monster
stature-shadow on the plaza the generals
like to vacate.

                       Tonight you get to be the belle
of the Ballard novel of your own dockside making.
It's not easy, getting older, and trying to tell
the whiskers from the mosquito legs, reading
the friendly fire roasting from the shrimp boot
pole danseurs, sussing the celestial tea baggings
in protective big&tall beret, skunking the huddle.

I'm the kind of person that hates saying
"I'm the kind of person." I'm the kind that's only
weighted with flimsy lira now besting my solid
dollars, so have to offer you presents, so AbEx-like,
made solely of the surface of their de-papering.

So, natch, unwrap this batch:
Arabic numeral on a bunch of fries
Chalmette sunflowers regifted from the K-line
shining broken brick road atrocious notions. Go there,
(preaching to the choir, bra) clad in sandwich board
brandished with the legend "Follow me to kick-ass
Poetry!" sponsored by pills and money and Mother
England in the lifeguard's fob.
                                               This season, birthday onion,
Fuck Joe the Plumber and the ratty clogged A-hole
he upwardly dethreaded. How bout some
Joe the fucking Strummer! We got a new genre going
called Stank, so rip this package like a savage;

like your yeti-sized spiritus, it's redeemable for the following
surprizes- architectural treasures of W Gretna,
the Mother-in-Law plant part of the bench, flashing
crack in the canoe's catbird seat, and hey, should
that snapped bra strap be caught outside the shut
screen door? I'm rigging my catapult with
this tribute rock to you, to destroy the Career Center
in the distance. Let's be toast. Let's eat the cake's ashes
             and call it tomorrow.