Extraordinary Madness, For Patti Smith, friend of William S. Burroughs 

The lunch is always naked—that was Burroughs,

bearing the news steadily and with a wink

at the end of a long fork

There’s a newspaper spoon somewhere in there too,

folded like Guernica’s horses

Snorting acrid verses

Rimbaud spotted somewhere nearby,

having achieved fabulous opera

His rude shithouse scrawls

sanctified

solidified

Rolling forth through Kansas wheat fields

rolling like a family of tumbleweeds roll

rolling under leaden coffins of American sky

where freedom’s torch sizzles and dies

like a wet cigarette

with a shrug

and a sigh

Where are you now my friends

the spirit of revolution involuted with a death spiraling suite of

catastrophes

Iron monuments to all-systems crash regarding me with a hard eye

Triangulating all future forms of my skeleton nailed to the mast of the

Drunken boat

Oh Rimbaud, oh Patti Smith

Burroughs and his fork tines stabbing at the grey matter

digging inside the TV mind, digging out bits of

chewy pink neon.

(This poem previously appeared in The Smol Bear Review)

About Alex S. Johnson

Dubbed “the Baudelaire of our time” by Cyberpunk pioneer and screenwriter of The Crow (1994) John Shirley, Alex S. Johnson has written 15 books, including the canonical New Line Cinema Friday the 13th spinoff novel Jason X: Death Moon. A music journalist with such legendary magazines as Metal Maniacs, Zero Tolerance, Brave Words and Bloody Knuckles, Blue Blood and Metal Hammer, Johnson’s stories and poems have appeared in The Surreal Grotesque, Bizarro Central, Cut Up!, New Generation Beats 2024, HWA Poetry Showcase Volume III and Prying Deluxe Edition, alongside the likes of Edward Lee, Joe Hill, Allen Ginsberg, Charles Bukowski, Lucy Taylor, Alessandro Manzetti, Ron Whitehead, Ellyn Maybe, Wrath James White, Eric LaRocca, Poppy Z. Brite, Catfish McDaris and Caitlin R. Kiernan.

The founder of Nocturnicorn Books, Johnson’s most recent publication is White On White: A Literary Tribute to Bauhaus, with a Foreword by transgressive fiction icon Poppy Z. Brite and contributions from The Runaways founder Kari Lee Krome, two time World Fantasy and Bram Stoker Award-winning author Caitlin R. Kiernan, Bram Stoker Award-winning author John Palisano, industrial metal icon Jarboe (ex-Swans), Athan Maroulis from Spahn Ranch and Black Tape For a Blue Girl, Tara Vanflower from Lycia and Type O Negative, and Senor Fluffy: A Cat’s Tale creator Hazel-Ann Lynch. 

Johnson lives in Carmichael, California with his family.