More of My Video Store Outsider Poetry

Today a wasp flew in the window. I opened another window so it could escape. A lot of our troubles are just looking for a way to get the hell away from us. It is us who holds on to them, not the other way around. Now it is midnight and a band is playing in the alley behind my house and I am drinking Earl Grey tea with this outrageous German mountain clover honey. I want to post this Outsider Art by Jesus Correa before I post some poems.

"Hell," Jesus Correa

At The Video Store


At the video store
My habit is to rent
One cartoon,
One zombie movie,
One wrestling video
And one porno.


Every night as I open
My Milk Duds and
Start to masturbate
I marvel that
The cops aren't
Knocking on my door.

     As we were doing errands tonight Jenny and I drove past several locations in Rockford that had once been video stores. Every time we drove past one I told her a story about that video store, and what videos I rented there, if they had snacks, how good or bad their horror section was. For the Blockbuster location I told her how Seven Doors of Death was gone for over two years, but they never took the empty box off the shelf, so every time I went there I hoped it would be back, but it never was. Then, two weeks before virtually every video store in America closed, Seven Doors of Death returned. Seven Doors of Death is Fulci's The Beyond. Jenny has a phobia of zombies o we have never watched a zombie movie together, so when I'm at the apartment I run Dawn of the Dead on a continual loop some nights. Speaking of zombies.

Dumb Questions

In every zombie movie 
From Zombie Lake to 
Children Shouldn’t Play 
With Dead Things, 
The living wonder 
What motivates the undead 
To clamor for human flesh, 
As if the undead are method 
Actors in a bad Fellini movie.

In one movie a coroner 
Asks the torso 
Of a bound zombie woman 
Why she lusts for brains.

Seems like a stupid question 
To ask someone 
Who wanted to eat your brains. 


     The video store was really a big part of my life for quite a few years. One of the few non horror rentals I made was the Hobbit animated Rankin and Bass videos. I rented them at the Video Outlet. I tell her that virtually every time we drive past there. On occasion I'll forget to tell her and she'll remind me and I'll tell her. One Video Outlet location that was a Taco Bell before that or after that then became a title loan store like every other empty building in town is where I rented The Monster Club for the first time in 1991, then used two VCRs to make a copy on VHS that I play to this very day 25 years later. One day that tape will break and I will be very unhappy. Here are your two Outsider poems about the video store. 


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