The Poetry of Meat Gizmo

Introduction by Jimmy Bannon

Pilot. Pool player. Platinoid. Poet. The enigma known only as Meat Gizmo is all these things, except for platinoid, which is a copper alloy known for its high electrical resistance. Gizmo is no metallic alloy. He's all Meat, and his highly evocative, often twisted wordplay comes splattering onto your computer screen like a fistful of fine, pink ham on a shopping spree.

When Gizmo started sending me his stuff one day out of the blue like a phone bill from Havana you never saw coming, I knew I had a couple of fresh hot tarts in the oven that were going to need a spanking. All I had was a piece of string and some marbles but I knew once I got my pants off and worked that crud out of the corner of my eye we'd be staring down the barrel of a twenty seven sixteen fudgeball magna carta like a boatload of dancing midget refugees on game day. Nobody knew what they were talking about in those days and Jerry the neighborhood butcher and some lady in a fancy wrap walking in a way we didn't understand and a whole lot of kids playing stickball. Hell, guys didn't want any muffins and nobody had a portmanteau. It was all scraps and diggory and knees that ached so bad in the cold and Cross-Eyed Lenny and a two-bit tin can that cost two bits.

Nobody ever asked me what I thought of Meat Gizmo then and they don't now. What I know about most things you could write on a couple of napkins, stuff them into an empty bag of potato chips, and spend the rest of the afternoon making crinkly sounds. I can tell you that the Giz is on the bashful side when it comes to his poetry on account of what some people might think about poems. But do yourself a favor. Peel the iron grip of this tough man's knuckles off from around your throat one day and read the string of words that the Giz has put together here and see if things don't just start seeming a little bit different later on back in the old haunts. You could do a lot worse and an old fighter and his mother still wearing the black socks and that frowsy tattered bathrobe and the expensive smell of cheap perfume hanging on every rat-a-tat-tat-tat of his cousin's lousy fish business.

yours from the low side,
Jimmy Bannon

Poems by Meat Gizmo

pollen
italics
snipe
untitled
cars
cosine
jungle
cycles
morning
face
after

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