Skip to main content

NaPo #2

Image
By Rusty Barnes

Third Wheel Blues


Cockatrices in the bedroom!
I told you that shit had to stop,
no more calling animals in
when your surfaces elude the mind.

Some stars streak across the sky
delivering bootylicious nuggets
of light from years and years ago.
I bet they saw the Stones in Boston.

That night Keith shot up onstage,
and they played Sister Morphine
three times before anyone noticed.
I fell in love with you late on an Aerosmith

tour when Skid Row opened and Sebastian Bach
challenged us all to smoke a little Mother Nature.
Now you've broken the hymen of our time
together with a strong hand and a rubber glove

I feel as if I could unsay all those negatives and
you would jump on my back for another ride,
rolling our trousers and walking through the muck
of the Duck Pond in the Common at three am

when no one but homeless people are out
and you feel free to crack jokes about the Dead Pool.
It's a safe bet I still love you and the way the fine
hairs on your arm still rise when I enter a room

might give me the impression some bone-jumping
is in order but your period came four hours ago
and I am a hot mess pleading for attention in a poem.
Please don't make me beg; I love those bacon dog treat

commercials. They remind me of you and I, the way I beg
and you, well, you know what you do. The sun is rising
like a pillow from a removed head. The new day promises
lots of things but sadly, I've found in this poem that despite

all the things I've said to re-woo you, they're nothing
when compared with the love you no longer have for me.
I'll cart up my laptop now and my silly dreams and fly
into the east. That means I'll follow the sun, yes,

and never forget you or your penchant for tiny dogs.

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

David Oliver Cranmer

By
Not Just Another Playlist Often, I sit in my swivel chair looking out the window, while jazz, country, or rock music plays. This pleasure goes on for many hours a mystic trance of sorts streaming—the glue maintaining my soul. I turn the best songs into playlists (once we called them mix tapes) puzzling over the perfect order. Does Satchmo’s “What a Wonderful World” kick off my latest list or make it the big soulful closer? And does “Mack the Knife” go higher in the set than “Summertime?” That’s an Ella Fitzgerald duet! “Foolishness? No, it’s not” whether you are climbing a tree to count all the leaves or tapping to beats. These are the joys that bring inner peace and balance (to a cold universe) lifting spirits skyward. David Oliver Cranmer ’s poems, short stories, articles, and essays have appeared in publications such as Punk Noir Magazine , The Five-Two: Crime Poetry Weekly , Needle: A Magazine of Noir , LitReactor , Macmillan’s Criminal Element , and
Post a Comment
Read more

Corey Mesler

By Rusty Barnes
  I think of you tonight, my Beats I think of you tonight, my Beats, and I am grateful.  I walked the narrow lanes of Academia and never felt at home. There were men and women in the flowerbeds, their heads full of theorems and poems. There were teachers who could lift their own weight in prose.  I was lonely. I was too loose.  I was a lad from the faraway country of Smarting. But I had you as so many before me. I had you and I knew secret things. I could count on you like a percussion. And now I want to say: I love you.  If not for you, what? I want to say. If Allen Ginsberg did not exist it would be necessary to invent him.  COREY MESLER has been published in numerous anthologies and journals including Poetry, Gargoyle, Five Points, Good Poems American Places, and New Stories from the South . He has published over 25 books of fiction and poetry. His newest novel, The Diminishment of Charlie Cain , is from Livingston Press. He also wrote the screenplay for We Go On , which won The Me
Post a Comment
Read more

Amy Holman

By
My mother made herself the deer with a broken leg  We saw a deer through the pane into someone else’s yard. The leg moved like a tube sock pinned to the hip  and half filled with sticks. I did not like to see it suffer, either. She was upset —my mother —that no one helped  the doe. Was it a mother, too? As if we were the first to observe the scene. We weren’t. All had been told to let her be. My mother had suffered a destruction  of the self, a divorce, and no one cared. That wasn’t true.  We were grown, on our own. I agree it was hard. Yet  in those moments of a cold November day, we watched  a doe, disabled and enduring, walk across a yard and eat  a hedge. I wish she could have seen it like that. Amy Holman is the author of the collection, Wrens Fly Through This Opened Window (Somondoco Press, 2010) and four chapbooks, including the prizewinning Wait for Me, I’m Gone (Dream Horse Press, 2005). Recent poems have been in or accepted by Blueline,
4 comments
Read more