Eugene's Black Magic

Sometimes I witness simple normal things when I'm in a smokey dark booth at the bar and I am nothing if not compelled to turn those moments into dramatic poetry...

He walks black in from the door,
His lavender shirt called into question,
They beg him for tricks,
Magic tricks,
They want his bold black cock,
Drunk and thirsty for his love,
Screaming in imagined ecstasy,

Eugene, show us a card trick,
Show us a card trick,

And one among them speaks the bold truth,
Everyone needs a little magic in their lives.

7.2010

Listening to her Words

City boys and girls released to play cowboys and cowgirls in the mountains for a summer...

Jenni hid her eyes when we talked,

placing a strand of thin hair behind her ear,

the profile of her boy's blue eyes

not enough for my consolation

so I talked to her high cheek bones instead.

Her teeth were too white for genetics

or her skin was too dark for her teeth,

I wondered what it would be like to kiss such thin lips,

perhaps like kissing a gun shot wound

and would she use her tongue?

Jenni frustrated me when she talked

because I wouldn't look into her eyes when she spoke,

I watched her bright belt buckle,

wanting to bite it to test the validity of its gold,

looking for a panty line on her hip

under her Wranglers wrapped tight

around the sticks of her long legs.

We carried on

afraid of the length of our conversation

but neither sure how to successfully end it.

I looked at her face and begged her to look back.

When she looked at me I followed the pearl buttons

down her checkered shirt

trying not to stare at her flat chest.

Our words floated between us in misery,

on a soft blanket of awkwardness that

we would forget in a matter of minutes.

Jenni was never beautiful

except when I talked to her.

5.2007

Loleena

I witnessed the scene of this poem once, felt the tide turning, saw the dust and the mayhem and how she stepped out in front of them, those whose shifty eyes and swollen veins betrayed the lunacy inside of them. She stepped out and with her arms raised, did not hesitate inside her heart to believe they would stop...

She waved them off,
sweet baby chubby,
legs spread, arms waving wildly,
like a dancing monkey in the dusty alley,
patron saint of the thunder hooves,
beating against the hard earth,
drumming for rain,
they bore down upon her,
reaching with their long legs,
and no longer stepping lightly,
to the priestess, Loleena,
giving confession to Catholic school girls with perky breasts,
blessing them with the ammonia smell of horse piss,
blue-eyed Loleena,
tubular sections of torso,
a moustache of light sweat,
her sunburned arms did not belong to that pasty belly,
they charged,
in panic and purposeless,
dark sweat of summer sun along their necks,
sweet baby chubby Loleena,
she was not afraid that day,
she waved them off,
bastard beasts of regalia,
sliding across the stark and cracked ground,
corralled by the stallion,
stallioness,
blue-eyed Loleena.

5.24.2010