Mike Zone is the Editor in Chief of Dumpster Fire Press, the author of  Shedding Dark Places (almost), One Hell of a Muse, A Farewell to Big Ideas and Void Beneath the Skin, as well as coauthor of The Grind.  frequent contributor to Alien Buddha Press and Mad Swirl. His work has been featured in: Horror Sleaze Trash, Better Than Starbucks, Piker Press, Punk Noir Magazine, Synchronized Chaos, Outlaw Poetry and Cult Culture magazine. 

New season

The long hot summer careens by through a furious breeze whipping up the sands of time
reflections and ravages
crash test dummy drivers and passengers slamming into walls
falling off cliffs into stagnant infernos
five years it takes to fully accept the death of the woman who bore you
let’s trade that acceptance for the death of pending offspring and forsaken love
oh, wait my best friend just bludgeoned a five-year-old girl to death with a hairbrush
it’s not Hitchcock
but it’s real
years before he stopped me from putting a noose around my neck
laughed as I showed him the nail
and showcased a stretched-out rope
what?
did I just switch this narrative?
past tense? present tense? future tense? 
first person? second person?
how about just tense?
my mind is a bullet train speeding through the force of it all letting discarded realms of time’s past burn 
that sand is ash
it blows away into the negation of wasteland blues
I’ve learned to move in a desolate harmonious eternity that maybe more copper than gold 
at moment

Homebound: (After Dylan…maybe)

There’s a serpent in the garden
a shaman in the grass
here’s a lizard on a rusted hood 
drying out in the sun
I’m soaked in the rain
nothing biblical in my shoes- flood cleansing nor sea parting
but there’s bitter salt in psychic wounds
with a psychedelic trip to be had
and if you’re in the valley of the never
there’s a place of forgotten ways
where cheesecake molds and black dahlia after-effects no longer make up the atoms of love and grit
so what did the joker say to the thief?
No one really knows…
there’s just a slew of guys calling themselves the messiah
trying to get land back that never belonged to anyone in the first place
land is land
and Bob
well, Dylan ain’t no second 
‘cause no one ever really came 
first

unhinged?

Maybe, I’ll slip razorblades underneath my skin
dig them out after a bit of healing
with a webcam on beforehand
live broadcast
is this poetry?
I’ll ask
is it?