Jose Padua, Author at Sensitive Skin Magazine

An End-of-the-World Cult of My Own

Jose Padua

One day I will have my own end-of-the-world cult. We will believe that the end of the world is coming tomorrow, and that we had better be prepared. If the end doesn’t come tomorrow, we will admit our mistake, and post...

Praise Song for Today

Jose Padua

Praise Song for Today I am writing in praise of sloth, in praise of doing nothing and by nothing I don’t mean watching television or sleeping, I mean doing nothing: no moving about the house with your arms hanging l...

Our Heavy Metal Life

Jose Padua

Sometimes I like to imagine that my family and I are a heavy metal band, playing gigs in the southern states, riding in a big tour bus that has skulls painted on the side, and a big decal of the grim reaper wielding hi...

Dong of the Dead

Jose Padua

The name of this poem is Dong of the Dead. It is my attempt to cash in quickly on the literary zombie craze by writing the first literary zombie porn novel in verse. I am writing it while sitting in the back of a pickup ...

A Life of Uncontrollable Urges (or Tourette’s and the Writing Life)

Jose Padua

On a recent Sunday afternoon, as I pushed a cart in the aisle between the checkout counters and the racks of men’s shirts at Walmart, the song that went though my head was Brian Eno’s “Here Come the Warm Jets.” Eve...

Lean on Me

Jose Padua

Back then sausage, eggs, hash browns, and toast cost under three dollars for br...

For The Saints And Angels, Miles Davis, And You

Jose Padua

Miles Davis was a skinny motherfucker, a bitter and often mean man. I have always been a little on the stocky side and while o...

Crack

Jose Padua

I can’t tell whether the flowers are falling or floating in this painting just as I can’t tell wh...

Virginia

Jose Padua

Let happiness lie like a dog on your lap, Virginia, state of green, state of mountain roads, and tackler of new centuries, but don’t get upset if we leave you. Virginia, let your vagina set you free or get out ...

P-Funk Reshapes the Landscape of the Redneck Town I Live In and Other Acts of Reformation and Reconstruction

Jose Padua

Behind the wheel listening to P-Funk in my new neighborhood the blank stare of the shirtless Larry the Cable Guy lookalike sharpens to crystal clarity as his lazy slouch straightens up into a confident strut and the words ...

On These Days Driving

Jose Padua

Perfection is all those horrible old love affairs they tell their latest lover about in bed as they smoke ci...

Why Drunken Poets Need to Procreate

Jose Padua

If it were somehow obligatory that I sum up my existence with a single sentence—or perhaps with just a phrase and a simple image—I’d be at a loss. I would, in fact, feel quite helpless, as if I were trapped in some h...

Self-Portrait as Dennis Hopper’s Frank Booth from Blue Velvet

Jose Padua

After turning on the television one sleepless early summer night, I realized that many of the sounds I make, as a re...

MacArthur Park

Jose Padua

When I was a kid I thought that the greatest record ever made was the 1968 mod orchestral rendering of of Jimmy Webb’s lost love opus, MacArthur Park. For me, MacArthur Park was a flash of wisdom, an epiphany a...

A Portrait of America in Trash

Jose Padua

I give to you a portrait of America in trash. I give it to you with love and respect, America: mountains of beer cans crumpled, plastic figures with fallen action, black velvet portraits of Elvis with...