they plop down in the bus seat
behind me
two teen girlies in piles of layered
clothing to stay warm
I’m invisible
strapped into the slot for a
wheel chair
handicapped people can be
hard to see
one tells the other about cutting
herself around her pubes so people
couldn’t tell
they’re talking in whispers, but I’m
invisible and they don’t know I can
hear everything
I can smell the scent of their hair
the other one tells her friend she
does it under her boobs
self-mutil...
there’s this guy that lives across the
street from our new house
I think his name is john or tom or something
like that
he told me he had just gotten out of jail
for stealing a bicycle for crystal meth
sometimes late at night
I sit in the door and smoke a joint
while I listen to the bodeans or the pixies or
john lee hooker
he strolls out into the street
hoping I’ll let him hit the joint
with his shaky hands
I tell him
the guy I live with is crazy
seriously fucked up from ...
when I was nine
the year my father died
and my mother started drinking
she gave me a set of encyclopedias
as old as I was
I would spend hours reading
in it, picking one out of the
alphabet and going away in
my head while my mom drank
in bar downstairs
I hated the bar and the drunks
and all the shit that came with
them, but I loved my mom even
when she forgot to love me
it was life.
I didn’t know any better
all the kids I knew had families
like mine
fucked up mean dysfu...
Moskowitz
back in the day
played the Flying Dutchman
here today and gone tomorrow
seeking shelter in a safe-house
hiding from the man that said
she was his wife
then said "I promise
I’m gonna KILL YOU!!!”
J. Masuda © 2007
I’ve got a lot of aches and pains
(living at light speed has it’s price)
and there are times when only a
handful of narcotics will dull the
pain
I bitch about it and sometimes
I allow myself a moment of self-pity
but only a moment,
then I remember I’m not in Afghanistan
getting my brains blown out
or in Somalia starving getting my
brains blown out or
Iraq getting my brains blown out
or
Darfur starving and running from
camel riding assassins getting my brains
blown out
I go...
I was forty-seven years old
and I was finally making my first
confession
the church had seven priests in
different corners
each with a line of the confessing
my legs were wobbly and I was sweating
across my forehead like I had my
own little rain storm going on
I wasn’t sure seven priests would
be enough to clean my ass up
but I stepped up when it was my
turn sat down and did the “Bless
me Father, for I have sinned.”
he knew it was my first confession
and told me to relax an...
when I was a boy
six or seven
I met this old Mexican drunk
named Gus
he would come to my mother’s
café in the sunny afternoons on
the Texas side of the Gulf Coast
drink Pearl beer with beads of sweat
glistening through the amber glass and
tell me stories
one Sunday I walked over to his
place
he lived in a travel court of shacks
that followed a circle drive that ended
where it started
it was warm already
maybe hot
he sat at a gray topped formica
kitchen table on wo...
“oh, I love my junkie boyfriend”
meagan said.
watching sickboy drive the twenty foot
cad steering the big wheel with his
knees
he timed the lights
while he tied off with the seatbelt
and pushed into a vein,
he was dancing in his head
just short of the nod
letting go of the belt and breaking
out in that shit-eating –grin
he always got when the shit
hit his head
she leaned against him and ran
her nineteen year old hand over
his thirty year old cock,
“I love my junkie boyf...
I read today about the "Big" guys in poetry
a sordid tale of in-fighting, nepotism, and the rigging
of the contests, a sad comment on the world of the
august and ivory halls of legitimacy,
a shadow of darkness, crinkling the edges like
dirty money, has been cast over the paragons of
verse and foiled the pristine veneer of the
mystical sage,
for a moment I thought I would drink to their
nakedness and mourn the lose of their facades,
but then I smiled as I realized I was right whe...