david badgerow
www.facebook.com/Whoisdavidbadgerow
Jack be nimble
Jack be stiff
Jack Daniel's please kill
Taylor Swift.
on nights like this it's
old man Sanders across the hall
struggling with his sterility
and raising his wife's bastard son in silence
to be a man who will one day
manipulate a woman's emotions
in a train station at 4 a.m.
it's too early to be this drunk
yet i am
and
he is too
i can hear him shouting at
himself, his wife, and his half breed redheaded son
at the dinner table,
over something like Blondie in the background
and something about baseball in the morning.
i don't usually rhyme much
but my thoughts are coming quicker
i'm lifting into the sky right now
drunk on a curious liquor
i recall a scene in a bar last night
one involving a french tickler
i'm seeing her much more clearly now
my memory no longer flickers
i offered to take her eyes home with me
and her body didn't bicker
i took her to a street in pound town
and oh god, did she take me with her
at the top of her lungs, she called my name
sometimes she called me mister
but alas, it's the next morning now
and i think i'll have to ditch her
98 bottles of jack on the wall
my stomach is getting sicker
my mind is sharp like a noodle
my tongue is getting slicker
wish you could see me right now, mom
goddamnit, i'll take a picture
while the young kids
burn their lips on
unfiltered cigarettes
and the poets
are distracted,
i'm kneeling in an alley
flushed with desire
clutching your number on a napkin.
while the children
and the saints
are crying in dysentery
behind guerrilla masks and guns
i'm imagining the flesh of your stomach
folded over the length of my thigh
and the roar of a volcano
in your heart.
someone robbed the Glendale train
last night
while i was peering into a dream
i was dropping pennies down a dark well
when i woke up
i was pissing into a dirty kitchen sink.
i'm still a poor bastard,
i'd still give a canadian a cigarette,
probably won't ever kill a man
but if i do,
he'll die with my
respect.
i remember that night on your front steps
smoking cigarettes and talking with your mother
while
i cradled your heart and
you cried on my chest
i remember middle school english class
and your first thong,
pink and white and blue
i remember we made that bourbon summer
last until december
i remember bottle rockets and champagne
the morning your brother died
i remember carrying you home
in the rain
the day after you escaped from the hospital
and you cried then, too.
i remember lying on the cold dirty tile
of your mother's kitchen
whispering Neruda in your ear
shivering & sweating with you
that night we took ecstasy
i remember the first night
you let me slip an honest prayer between your lips
i am a citizen of the terrible landscape
preaching to savages
hair-raised, growling and
sniffing each other.
& the wind has
not a penny to spare
for the frightening world
i am the thought provoking senator
of this state
i dance naked on broken wrists
and beer cans full of tobacco spit
my mind is crazed
on cartoons and
my lungs absorb my own
existence in a cigarette.
i am perched on a roof
the green dusk sky stretched
out like a beach towel
above me.
thirty-four stories up
and i hold the moon in
a cradle.
she washed off all her make up
with the hose from the garden
as the radar sun sank below
Nelson hill
i watched her dance and strip
in my bedroom
like a ballerina behind a smoking gun
she asked if i liked what i saw
and i said nothing
instead i sat in front of her burning
an awkward leaf of paper between
my busted lips
while her hips in the mirror
got the best of me
and then all at once
like a building's collapse
i confessed:
don't release me until it's over
this is the first time i've loved you.
that night
we sank to new depths
beneath
the warm molasses midnight moon
lying on the cold kitchen tile
of my father's house
barely speaking.
i sent a postcard
from a deserted train car
but you threw it away and
wept over the way i wrote your name--
the last time you saw me
i was wearing a pink carnation
in a pin-striped suit
but i traded it on a cold night
nearly three years ago
for a swig of rotgut wine
and a
dirty
postcard.
--now i'm waiting for you
to turn into a paper bird
and burn
into
me.
"this is our new thing"
you sigh as we lie on your bed
fully clothed on top of each other
on top of your down blanket.
you stuck needles in my arm
and i stuck needles in your arm
"we both deserve this"
i whisper into your eyelid
with cigarette breath
underneath four months
of hibernation teeth.
our tongues were
postponed
in ecstasy
and now i
can
feel the tension
mold
around the warm glow of your breath
the tremor of my body is born
in my heart and etched in cold swingsets.
i am in an intelligent concrete room
while familiar silhouettes switch direction in the balmy wind
there is a dim stone portal spending a light
so still and small and dissolving into the sunless wall
under the scattered ruin of the sacred world
its gaunt mind studies beneath hieroglyphs
and into oblivion
it is later in the night and i am riding on an unsettling
crucifix doused in drugs and hammocks and the
blind face of eternity is wearing a headdress
filled with plumes of indecipherable intellect
and she has transcended my ego
with holy dreams
in a dream that i can't shake
she was standing by a fence post, shaking
all alone with tears in her eyes
with the dawn on her breast and lips
and the stains from my kisses there too
then i turned to the east
and look myself in the face
i am the sun and i am tired
i haven't slept in days
because there are
better things to do
in bed
when i'm with
her.
Lured
by unspeakable, ineluctable gravity
Kisses, vehement, and by no means our first,
speak of experience, a wordless wisdom that now gives flight to innocence,
unprecedented familiarity among two who have spoken so little
a gentle tug of war between souls, transcending feeble sensation, arriving at conversation
Solid, fervid, with perfection of cadence – a meter aberrant, fantastic, unimpeded by numerical confines
Now
a limitless tickling between two souls
like courting doves
And the smoke in your mouth became sweet,
your saliva a quenching potion of forgetfulness,
And at this moment neither past nor future have ever existed,
There is only this delicious wine of our lips and the nonsensical intercourse
of two sipping souls.
all i have now
is ten toes in the sand
and the sun on my
chest, face and shoulders
i'm completely contaminated by
this bottle in my left hand,
the first drink i've had in days.
last night i spent
two hours knuckle-deep
in your fishnets, our tongues
were playing twister while
your daughter slept upstairs.
she was dreaming
of a car on fire
and a house exploding with
magnificent light,
downstairs you were wetter
than the deepest ocean
and i had the warmth of
your whisper in my ear.
roses are red
my name is dave
this poem is random
Micro-
wave.
her hair was a cloud of cigarette smoke
and flowed down like beer
but smelled more like a whiskey distillery
she looked down on me
with her knees on my chest, she
popped her gum and
arched her back,
drilled a hole in my heart
but my heart still pounds and pumps
just like thunder or gasoline
when i remember that night,
and those next four days
we spent storming into
each other's secret hiding places
and driving reckless into the night.
we shared a nickel's worth
of bourbon
and a crumpled cigarette
when her parents found us
we were both
wrapped 'round each other
and in the stiff dawn light i wished
i was still wearing those
silly-looking shades.
