new keds shoes

glancing at the house

once holding me close,

keeping me sick

with wino bourbon blight.

--

my friends are gathering

in the cross corner lot

for remembrances of broken glass,

ghosts at play with new keds shoes.

--

i'm always almost with them,

dragging a bit behind

carrying shattered consciences

of errant kites fallen into power lines.

--

this gorgeous patch of suburbia

in its formative years

fills the caverns of my memories

with rosebuds and plum trees.

--

safe for a time

from our little house of horrors

where mom always said,

"don't play happy in the house."

--

or maybe she simply set the stage

for me to draw my own conclusions

of our depressive misdemeanors

with a fierce beauty all their own.

puddles and circumstance

Her foot steps drum

through rainbow puddles

staining sidewalks sleepy

in quiet after hours

broken but by laughing coughs

and distant sirens caterwauling

toward those unfortunate denizens

bested by circumstance,

beaten by this night.

goodwill sunflowers (van gogh on the cheap)

the pale green plaster walls crack

to a nicotine ceiling sadly

coughing up our acrid interior

hazy through their shroud of putrid.

--

a thrift store van gogh muses

from his living room perch on high,

they lie catty corner to one another

in fading upholstered coffins

numb to vincent's goodwill sunflowers.

--

sick, smokes, and delirium

and never ending bargain basement booze

flow by the hand-me-down television

tuned to unwatched watergate hearings

whose treachery can't be bothered

in this netherworld of ours.

august '77

Elvis is in rehearsal for his last show,

polishing the toilet seat

for an audience of one;

the king can see that final curtain

rising through the mist

of his deep fried fame,

singing songs to himself

no one will purchase,

gummy through the cobwebs

of pharmaceutical sadness.

--

My father is in rehearsal for his last sale,

dampening the sofa cushions

for an audience of us;

my dad can see that final customer,

yellow through the mist

of cirrhosis fever,

speaking words to himself

no one will fathom

as they drown into a jigger

of bourbon madness.

--

The king and my pops

never made it to September,

dissolving into nothing

in the flush of the Summer of Sam.

Wonder of the Wenceslas Square KFC

She got drunk on a feeling -

I wish it were mine -

then left me

without ever having come.

She's a never ending angst

to those she inhabits

with herself more at ease

than a child's imagination.

She's my lost love, the wonder -

working the counter

on the late shift

at the Wenceslas Square KFC.

The Briny Deep of Bandaid Bitters

I'm seven years washed ashore

from the briny deep

of bandaid bitters,

cowering, covering wounds laid open

with no numbing libations

to salve my psyche.

I've learned to comport myself

with field dressings

of Effexor and fear come crawling,

keeping at bay

all that burns

like salt water on a nerve

exposed to the ocean breeze.

Dyslexic Misanthrope

The softest side of empty

is plenty hard to live with;

the quietest despair,

a dissonant dementia.

I am a dyslexic misanthrope,

driven to self destruction,

content with self distraction,

left with self delusion.

I stand in repose

wrapped 'round life's tangle,

with the knowing smile

of a joke played on myself:

The horrific

and the beautiful

are but two sides

of the same straight razor

and Leonard Cohen called

to let you know

you need a shave.