Thursday evening

The light fades and crashes.

I wander the streets in blackness,

no stars no wonder.

Staggering stumbling, curbs gutters

back alley brokers, broken lives

lying naked.

I stagger and stumble, my life

flashes behind my eyes, a flock

of blackbirds lifting off scattering,

regrouping fed and watered flying

off to some distant end.

Life flies off  into the dark horizon.

Bricks and bones streetlamps,

beat cops, tramps, whores,

punks, coalesce , congeal, pool.

Everybody looking for something

everybody looking for someone,

grasping and groping

under the blanket

of night.

the girl upstairs

“Turn the fucking fan on”

She yelled a lot that

girl upstairs

she yelled at the

boy who shared her

bed, she yelled at the

cat, the neighbor,

even me, she yelled

all day her shrill

voice bouncing around

in my head.

“How am I supposed to

write with you

yelling all the time”?

“Go fuck yourself”

she replied.

mescaline

reflections deceptions

I look nothing like

I feel

I feel

nothing anymore

a red door stands ajar

inviting enticing

I enter and never

look back

the stairs lead

down

and

down

I go

never

look

back

citylights

The rain fell hard, the wind pressed fast against my skin,

my face itched my teeth ached.

I walked quickly head down,

I had no place to be

I had no place to go.

The night life traffic oozed past, buzzing electric light

guides me in, into the core,

home.

Bookstore, surplus store, liquor store.

Stores selling food, stores selling sex, stores selling drugs.

I stop and buy some cigarettes, I stand in a wedge of neon

bright and strike a match.

I draw in and let loose, an Indian limps up with a question,

I passs him a smoke, he tucks it behind his ear so I pass him

another.

He ambled on,

with no place to be

no place to go.

Evelyn

The woman with a voice like a gravel truck,

curled hair,

cigarette smoke curls blue gray.

Her upper lip is split, a smile like a mile of

dirt road.

She laughs like a serpent

She cries like a brawler

drunk from punches and twelve round

dances.

She grabs me and pulls me close

thrice my age and twice my size

she holds death grip tight,

love, lust,

thrust down on my small voice

lost in the darkness

of her wasted past.

no reply

Brick and mortar view, floor to ceiling alleyway

shadowless room.

Jewelers, lawyers, lovers,

castaways.

I want to cry out but there is only dust

and cobweb sobs,

tearless hopeless.

I long for you, faceless unknown one,

a hand in these dark nights, these

nightlong nightmares.

I long, I pray, I curse.

Black stretches taut covering

my shame, cowering, hiding,

a blind behind which to crouch.

Point Blank Range

He lived by the sword and he died.

He died in the cab of a pickup

truck in a field far away from

his son, his two daughters,

his grandchildren, and certainly

far away from me.

He died from a shotgun blast

at point blank range, he had

survived a shotgun blast some

forty years earlier, but fate had

since stopped smiling.

He died, I can only imagine,

instantly, his violent days

flashing before his eyes, the

muzzle flashes now, and then

he is gone.

Twenty two months would

pass before his remains would

be discovered, recovered, the

remnants of a man to be

buried by the remnants of

a family.