one night in a blizzard of snow and madness in a little Indiana town lost to the interstate Christopher cut his palms with a butcher knife and worked through the night painting his heart in broad strokes   swearing in ten second breaths at what a slut she could be he’d leave his mark dripping on canvas then sobbing he’d cry out his love for the slut that ate his heart her cannibal ways left him crippled with only ten fingers and ten toes and nothing to pu...

  mo cooks five days a week down at the horse head bar and grill he practices his art on a circle of drunks that crave his special flavors not all of them food   but he’s not just a cook-ie cutter form of a man that fills the bellies of the jovial crowd waiting on his creations his art is in his heart and the desire to find that other half to keep his insanity finely tuned has ruined better men than he   but like every man before him his dick leads the...

  lil’ t wakes with the sun two hours from the last time she cracked her eyes full of sweat to cry the pain in her back and get ready to work another day with smiles for the tips and kind words for drinkers getting drunk killing their pain   all around pain   but behind the smiles and false promises a little girl silently cries as she goes about the hard moments of living not knowing why or when or who will come to ring the bell of wonderments that raise...

  bob’s got two heartbeats somewhere in redding ca. the courts take his check every other week but the heartbeats can’t be seen through the wall of a vindictive mother   so he downs a dozen vodkas a night chased by forty milligrams of synthetic smack to kill the pain and keep the blood in his veins   cause the feelings cold and all he wants is to be warm—even if it’s just for a night.   J. Masuda © 2008

  they told her it was pre-cancer like she was pre-registering for wedding gifts   don’t worry they said the next test will tell us more and more and more   but the test cost money and no smiles from the financial counselor will discount the little pre-cancer cells into a willingness to wait   they keep dividing and mutating and growing stealing hope like vultures feasting on road kill you’ll be better—for a price   but firs...

  there’s an old man in white shoes he walks in circles around a green planter that holds a dying tree slumped to the side   on the third revolution he lights a hand-rolled cigarette then he walks in circles   pausing to stare at the burning ember of his cigarette and the dying leaves of the tree then back to walking circles   when he has finished the cigarette he field strips the butt and slides the remains into his pocket before he leaves he ...

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-mu...

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 fr...

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 dy...

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...

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...

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...

“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 b...

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 ...