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Abel Araya Aug 2013
The carpenter sits in his rocking chair as he thinks,
as the sun drowns itself into the dark clouds, he waits.
Waiting for something to tell him that he is no longer a boy anymore,
that his maturity and humility have been masqueraded
Into a body that resembles him.
Every night, when he eats, he sits alone
His plate as round as the moon,
He lights one candle on his dinner table.

Most nights, when he is drinking heavily,
he walks to the back of his house,
sits in front of an old wooden bench,
gazing across the lake and he picks up a book,
construing ideas and proposals that he fails to recollect the morning after.
He reads poems to himself, poems from books.
Poems about the nature and history of the human condition,
about the muscles and the tendons in our bodies
that bend and crumble and shiver at our disposal.
Bottle in his left hand, book in his right.
And sometimes he switches hands to highlight his drunken dexterity.
Clinching his book of poems as if they were his children,
too afraid to go out into the soft fear of the electric night,
and he was the wild one to present to this world.

He feels abandoned, dismayed,
and he no longer sees a light at the end this tunnel,
like someone or something is closing it,
leaving a crevice wide enough just to test and to tease
his willing and purpose to escape from it.
He feels a burning in his chest
as he trickles down the last drip of scotch onto his lips,
tasting death like it was tapwater.

It's midnight and he has to wake up in six hours,
wake up to a routine where his work becomes unnoticed
because he doesn't have the ***** to stand up for himself.
So, he sits and he waits for something to happen,
something fantastic or supernatural to help him grow wings
so he could relieve the tension on his shoulders,
his bones realigned to fit the being of gods.
He closes the book, walks back to his house
and blows his one candle at the dinner table,
blackening the room to fit the clouds of the night.
He lies in his bed as he engulfs his body with his comforter,
hoping to never wake up in a world that will not hesitate to laugh in his face.
JC Lucas Feb 2014
The women drink the tapwater-
even the infants are drunk.
Tony Luxton Jul 2015
1
I'll try something new
can't even say number ten
Ugh never again

#2
Spahetti easy
don't understand the others
Oh dear down my shirt

#3
Mainly cold dishes
How about soup of the day
lovely gazpacho

#4
Iced tapwater, please
taking care of the pennies
after lunch Rennies.
Onoma Apr 2020
drills shrilly nosed into plywood

as storefronts were shuttered along

the walkway.

hazy tapwater sunlight diluted the

dogwood tree planted at center.

as a patch of pigeons were thrown

above it, whose wings became black

sticks across its white blooms.

frantically searching for the old man that

would normally feed them.

up ahead that brolic, mustachioed Puerto Rican

street vendor has been unstapled from the

sidewalk--his unheard cadences hustling the

numbers off watches.

— The End —