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Harry J Baxter Nov 2013
You wake up early already feeling an itch behind your eyes and at the base of your spine.
behind your throat. Sweating but **** - it's November and you had the window open. Four cups of coffee and seven cigarettes to start the day. A tip: if you put your hands in your pockets then nobody can see them shaking.
"You look hungry. Eat something."
force down a McMuffin or two at noon and a ham sandwich before work. Drive the car.
that night work is noise.  The shift ends with a paycheck.
Go withdraw thirty bucks. Find some *****.
"A guy's gotta cut loose."
a guy's gotta be cut off.
***** this ***** that
twisted up so tight. wound around the bend. coffee and the dashboard lights. Radiation.
three AM fumbling with the keys - alone under a street light at the bus stop
wake up to the tv playing infomercials. Shower. Now repeat.
g clair Jul 2015
you don't
know me anymore
just as sure as I am someone
I'm a stranger
you don't know me
and the fact feels
almost certain
like a stone wall
iron curtain
pretty sure that
I don't know you anymore.

the last time
that I saw you
least it seemed I thought I knew you
thought that I could see right through you
and I thought that you could see right through me too  

but the truth is you can't see me
you replace me with your memories
golden moments overshadowed
by embarrassment and shame
and the fun we thought we had
crushed by an elephant whose name
we'd rather not be speaking of
call it madness, never love
it truly seems like you don't know me anymore.

you don't owe me anything
you don't owe me
morning sunshine
I remember
burning embers
not a good time
or a late night
but a bad a fight
you don't owe me morning coffee
or a homemade egg mcmuffin
you don't owe me...
owe me anything at all.

and since we're left with little
but a memory fading fast  
it's like a cold and distant
dark and dreary
rainy lonely evening
somewhat comfortable in knowing  
we don't owe each other anything
not a word, no not a thing I think,
at all.

you don't own me anymore
and maybe onetime
I was someone
just a person
who meant something
maybe one thing or another
just to fill your empty nothing
never less my little something
more than what you had had before
but now I'm just another someone
someone lurking at your door
you don't owe me anything
like you never did before
since you certainly don't know me
not so sure you ever did
you don't own and you don't owe me
anymore.

the end.
Andrew Geary Dec 2014
Is present once again
in his blackened room,
hears songs in the trees.
The window glows: the sun
reaches all, and doesn’t care
about your comb-over.


Darkness leaves the world,
life refills the street:
cars commuting, bodies shifting
across concrete, passing
familiar others. Emil enters.

He watches the girl
over there: greasy black hair,
paled skin. She is pretty
in her damaged way.
Emil shoves away
Those thoughts, bites
into his McMuffin:
these are getting better.

Slow through the park,
Emil lingers. Joggers in their routes,
a Frisbee keeping itself in the air
until sputtering in the trim grass–
Emil overlooks everything.

He sees the marks glow
underneath his secretary’s
sleeves. He staggers over,
smiling, “I heard what you said,
that your girlfriend broke-in
and bit you in the arm.
If you need to, you can
stay at my place
for a while.” She smiles
a smile Emil’s been aware of
since middle school,
when girls wouldn’t even look
at him and his acne-scars twice.

He opens his door, and walks
within the black, only outlines
of things show. He flips the light
switch. Only he can alter this world.
the upshot constituted a figurative straw
     that broke the virtual camels back
where yours truly fingered as scape goat,
     who meekly, passively, and subserviently
     felt the stinging crack
of wooden, smooth,
     and oblong paddle and stands pat,

     asper innocence, though now
     (myself more than two score years
     orbitz around sun) remains more defiant
     for purportedly causing Roberta -

not her real name flack
and clears that blot (now a composite
     of petrified spitballs) as a hack
writer of poetry, feels jilted like Jack

donning many major protagonistic ruffian knack
nursery rhyme roles, which fables never didst lack
for upstart precocious, kickstarters impish grin,
     as if he just wolfed down a swiped Bic Mac

and goose that laid more than one golden egg
McMuffin running from the Giant,
     with spindle shank for each leg,
and sliding down the beanstalk, which didst peg
world wide web Marathon record
     suddenly the envy of Queequeg,

which way word ness
     far off course from the theme of this work,
hence hold tight
     to hazmat bag of **** pin jay dreck,
     while poetic license allows me to twerk

intended story aye (captain...
     oh captain) moost not shirk,
lemme reel yar attention
     back to the classroom of missus Labosh,

     hood didst whistle and perk
unbeknownst to me, my scrawny derriere
     unaware what quaint, hence danger didst lurk
for letting passivity
     find me singled out as the bona fide ****

wishing Moby **** could swallow
     hook, line and sinker
     with a slight even Steven crane
of his neck, every mother plucking bird brain classmate
     deemed Scott free, and Chutzpah didst gain

while this smart *** wannabe took a crash course,
     sans weltanschauung "Artful Dodging
     Spitball Shooting Maven" in the main
quite heavy on Physics and Trigonometry as became plane.
jules Oct 2017
The landlord told us never to go on the roof.
We take to borrowing others, tiptoes clanging on steel and iron
My knees rubbing gravel and asphalt.
We finish the wine and **** three stories up.

Most days we sit curled on broken patio chairs
Cigarette to split
No, I want my own.
Unspoken fourth neighbor snoresputtercoughsnortsneezes from the corner.
*******, Chaz.
We didn't come, by pick up truck and bicycle, to live above crackheads again.
I could smell it, those May mornings.
Misha, always sick, he said.
He was.

You were always the Junction.
Where
drunken promises
sober **** ups
idle hope
came and met ****** up ugly only to straighten out again.
Destined Final Resting Place of my last drops of liquor.
In a way it could never amount to more than that.
A wasteland we did nothing but lay waste to.

Avery taught me how to french inhale sitting on the hood of her 74' Ford something or other.
Fishnets Valu Village miniskirt, lakeside cold
Her zippo lighter roman candle flash bright.

Didn't I steal that?
Didn't I, one winter darkened morning, rifle through your jeans for TTC fare and a fiver for an Egg McMuffin?

Who can remember.

— The End —