Loitering
downtown
phantom-like
by the 7/11
by the factory wall where we first met.
So many years,
never forgotten.
We embraced
kissed
then fell away.
We were kids.
Even now
it feels stolen.
I imagine calling you
from a knocked out telephone booth,
meeting you in the vacant lot
which once was occupied by the diner.
I imagine you,
as you were then,
rushing up to greet me.
Loitering
downtown
Filed under poetry
He retreated to the basement of that big ol’ house,
after his mother died in an upstairs bedroom back in ’68.
Left everything in the place as it was the day she died.
Dirty dishes in the sink,
towels ready by the shower,
he left it all.
He’s been livin’ down in that basement for nearly 45 years.
I see him every once in a while,
pickin’ tomatoes from amongst the weeds,
roastin’ a rabbit over some branches he gathered from the woods behind the house.
He seems to prefer to be left to himself.
I spoke to him once, about 20 years ago.
He said he had to move into the basement,
the rest of the house was “too crowded with ghosts”.
Filed under Outlaw poetry, poetry
photo by hungrybison
Filed under micro stories, original photography, original writing, Outlaw poetry, poem
An unglamorous life.
photo by hungrybison
The difficult, unavoidable, and painful
circumstances of human existence.
Removed from the realm of nature,
to survive without adding to the horror,
often is the best we can do.
The beasts live in truth,
we in contradiction.
What remains?
Inconsequential matter,
culture, art?
The art of life,
both comical and tragic,
is simply the passion to exist.
Exist in harmony,
like the beasts.
To be human is to,
construct and destroy,
both dream and memory.
Paradoxically,
we butcher the passion of life,
in the act of living as a human.
No one likes to speak of it,
but sometimes people die old and alone.
Isolated and abandoned they slowly decay,
under the weight of time,
or kill themselves.
Friends and neighbours,
reduced to ghosts,
shadowy images on the TV.
Their voices silenced for days,
their world confined to an empty apartment.
A tomb for the living,
made of blood, bone, plaster and glass.
They wait for death.
Pills on the bed side table,
they exist while the days slip by unnoticed.
Filed under creative writing, micro stories, original writing, poem, short stories
What does it mean to be a man?
Photo by Hungrybison
Drinking beer at 9:37 in the morning?
Frozen blood,
shouted commands,
the mist surrounding men’s faces.
Deteriorating, exhausted,
a knife in the heart.
Hardened, vulnerable,
getting our asses whipped,
this is not how it is meant to be.
Pushed into this situation,
words from a saint,
damn, it’s cold.
Being a man is,
brutality.
Being a man,
insignificant, irrelevant,
a shear force of will,
means little.
Don’t let them down,
Don’t let them down.
Filed under American West, Blood, lonliness, love, micro stories, original photography, original writing, poem, poems, thoughts
Drowning in despair,
photo by Hungrybison
the inevitable mire of horse shit.
Let us retire to your room,
let me sink my iron into the warmth of your flesh.
Our being together,
soothes me, in its outlandishness.
My equilibrium is gone,
my eyesight blurred.
Is there an alter to kneel before?
My anxiety is displaced by whiskey,
and a fondness for the congregation
of the abused.
A cross, a desperate sign of optimism.
I should not be interfered with,
I should be afforded a tolerance.
I’m dying, I need a place,
to draw my last breaths.
I need to get out of this cold,
this numbing Montanan brace.
A futile hope for a reprieve,
before my flesh rots from its frame.
A cross, a desperate sign of optimism.
Was I not true?
Was I not a decent man?
Should I not be assured of my place in Heaven?
fuck.
Sleep eternal awaits for me,
for my unabated surrender.
Filed under American West, creative writing, fiction, lonliness, micro stories, original photography, poem
He understood the down and out,
photo by hungrybison
bumming cigarettes, and ill fitting clothes
that once belonged to another man.
He had no hometown,
spent his youth on the Mexican border.
There is no need for a hometown,
when one lives permanently on the run.
He often could not explain his actions or
his love of a good beat-down.
He survived in a melancholic. alcoholic world.
It was LA, 1974
he was an outsider, a troubadour from the noir world
of this city’s past.
This was California.
Southern California,
beaches,
Disneyland,
suntans, drugs and money.
This was America, but not his “America”.
He was from a more “pre Rock and Roll”,
more “Grapes of Wrath” America.
It’s 2:30 am,
I’m eating eggs in a ancient metallic diner,
with those who washed up on the
shores of the Promised Land, but
missed the bus to prosperity.
They sip on endless cups of coffee as the night
hides the reality of the streets outside the greasy windows.
There is a sense of freedom here.
There seems to be a tradition that
resembles despair, despiration,
but is something quite different.
Here they live free lives,
the drunks,
the loners,
the tramps,
the whores.
Here some keep to the old ways,
here in the night,
here in California.
The old bastards,
retired killers,
photo by hungrybison
tamed outlaws,
they once rode with Uylsses.
They were once “quick drawin’ mother fuckers “,
Badasses.
Now scarred and aged,
they drink.
Their swagger was slowed,
they have ceased to drift.
They never found El Dorado.
In age they found comfort in home.
Many of their like never grew old,
they lay across this country
in unvisited graves.
Their children inhabit
the heartland, the cities.
They have become the new generation of badasses.
He was knee deep in shit,
photo by hungrybison
so he took a vow of silence.
He rattled one too many cages,
he poked the dog with the stick one too many times.
He submerged himself in work.
He stayed away from the crowds.
Cloistered in his office,
he took pain killers.
At home he watched old sitcoms,
and ate Spaghettios cold, straight from the can.
He depressed people,
he angered others.
So he decided to just shut up;
Earn a paycheck, and just go the fuck home.
No longer would he voice an opinion,
no longer would he fight the system.
He became a model employee.
Filed under creative writing, lonliness, micro stories, original photography, original writing, poem, thoughts, writing
