FACE OF DISGUST

A haggard old man

rifles and digs

the public trash

can---black steel

bands bound---next

the red, white, blue

and black bus stop

sign.

He finds a piece

bits and eats it.

A man waiting for

the bus watches on

with two six-inch sub

sandwiches hanging in

a sack from his

hand.

He sees the old

man search diligently

eat shamelessly out

of need and is over-

come by profound

disgust, so that his

face twists, lips

turn down, eyebrows

slant, nose crinkles

wrinkles black lines

like a crumbled news-

paper, pity pangs

his thoughts to a uni-

verse of sorrow, eternal

pity.

He reaches in-

to the sack and hands

the old man a sand-

which before getting

on the bus and riding

away.

GO TO HELL

Love is black

discs in the eyes

inlets to a

deep abyss in-

side is where

I fall, weightless

head first, eyes

black beckon me

They implore

adore, attract

What is love?

A whim,

an exception?

I’ll do this

for you but

everyone else

can go to hell.

SITTING ON TOP OF THE HILL

Looking conversely down

porch-perched along an asphalt ribbon

wrapping down to windowless

bricked factories and particle-

boarded store fronts, where 
I used to be.

A brown grey black sparrow

hops to and fro the spotted grass

and cracked sidewalk

looking for his daily sustenance 
only then his flight. Where 
and how far?

Looking conversely up

Midwest-grounded and terra-
cotta obstructed, an impulse 
manifests from the back

black and urges him

forward and up---

Why him? Why now?

Nothing to do but

act upon it---lost

friends and family

the unknown and new

faces.

THE ANTIDEPRESSIONIST

[recto]I

[verso] know [recto] everything

[verso] is [recto] going

[verso] to [recto] be

[verso] O. [recto] K.

THE CLOUDS

Rolling in,

bringing change---

the ever constant---

your reaction? Turn

and face the wind.

SHE WAIT

I picked her up at the front of the high school Saturday night. Plastic gold, white and grey swirled granite and glass, a bastion of school pride, stood behind her. She sat upon a folding table, waiting for me, kicking her feet in a walking airborne rhythym. Long, curled strands of mahogany clasped a naive face. We were to go out and see, each by their own, if anything fond could strike. She was pretentiously captivated in me by sight, by cherry-picking me from a crowd the week before. She was already all in.

She looked at me like I was a god. And to her perhaps I was---the one to deliver her from parental constraints to my constraints in a new domestic world. It was in her smile; that smile. A happiness that shadowed judgement. Judgement that lived in moment and young aesthetic which existed in a world turned by hindsight/foresight and old, old logic. She was lost and hardly knew it.

It was in her eyes. Glass and sparks like a bottle rocket fixed at target not knowing that it would eventually explode, finishing in spectacular burst of spark, fire, red paper and heaped disenchantment. To her nothing could end like this.

The limestone lane met the lawn. Dusk rose, infused its rusty sky into an evening black. Only the equinox could cast a harvest shadow to make the blackest silhouettes of corn tassels, like an army of dead, dry soldiers waiting to be cut down. I was eighteen. It was the last semester. She wait like the rest of the world, stopped dead and black with yellow and violet dots swarming like fireflies off in a void.