Four Deadly American Vignettes Brought to You Live from Hellas
VazamBam
by Vassilis Zambaras
“Bestiality in the Badlands, circa 1958”
(Scripps)
Round Rushmore
Stark weather—
In Tinseltown, another
Heart crushed
Bunny’s bleeding but
Claude Hopper’s hitch—
Cock’s not wholly
Above
Suspicion.
“All-American Road Rage”
Fill up with white lightnin’, dude—
Get blue in the face
See red run one last red
Light after that mother
Fucker that shot you
The finger left you
In the lurch the semi
On the right slam-
Dunking your head—
Bam-bam you’re dead.
“Graveyard Shift Straw Boss at RJ Reynolds”
Now you get this
And you get it good,
You nicotine pocked hack
Reared asinine son of a dung
Reeking Camel sucker—
That was the last straw.
Now just drag that butt-
Smoking carcass of yours
To the meat wagon—
Pack it in.
“Mirage Rising up out of Death Valley, California”
A stinking shallow red
Lake, a high white wall
Of mountains ringing it,
Rain clouds making blue
Acid beads of sweat
Fringing the foreheads
Of pale faces
Up to their filthy necks in it.
MELIGALAS Greece—(Weekly Hubris)—6/13/11—Glosses to a finer appreciation of the poems: 1) Charles Starkweather and Caril Fugate, desperate stark-naked Hollywood starlets flat on their backs staring up at stardom’s ceiling, Looney Tunes, Playboy Magazine, Alfred Hitchcock, Animal Farm; 2) US spectator sport filmed on the road in front of live audiences dying for a once-in-a-lifetime thrill; 3) “Boss, the straw that broke the Marlboro Man’s ass is back”; 4) The Lily-White Ethnic Cleansing of the American West, better known as Death Valley Days, brought to you weekly on the boob tube by actor Ronald Reagan and Boraxo, followed up by the daily raping of the environment courtesy of seedy Boss Greed and his henchmen in Washington, DC.
Vassilis Zambaras
Vassilis Zambaras According to such reliable inside sources as The Weekly Hubris’s Publishing-Editor, VazamBam aka Vassilis Zambaras is all of the following, and more, in an order no one can vouchsafe as definitive: a publishing poet who writes every day of his life; a hugely successful father (and a not-so-very-successful local political candidate); a professor of English as a Foreign Language, with portfolio; a Renaissance Man of many skills, useful and not-so; a fount of information about his particular corner of his birth country; an unstable and utterly unique mix of Greek and American, American and Greek; and the man fortunate and wily enough to have made off with Messenia’s loveliest and most talented local daughter as his child bride. Besides being all the aforementioned, other more dubious sources have also reported seeing him hanging out at the corner of vazambam.blogspot.com—in the guise of a “new old kid on the blog, with an occasional old or new poem written off the old writer’s block.” Author Photo: Pericles Boutos