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Jack Bronson May 2020
To the lady who knocked on my door
Looking for your cats
You scared me
With you rat nest hair
And slight but evil like stare
I didn’t do anything to them
I tell you
I haven’t seen them around
But you won’t take my word
You accuse me
saying I drowned them
And buried them in the ground

A tear drops from your blood shot eye
I don’t know if it’s from sadness
Or from the bottom of a bottle of demise
I make sure to stay six feet away
I talk to you from the crack in my door
Now I know where I’ve seen you before
This woman who knocked on my door

It was a dream
A horrid dream
A nightmare it seems
You were standing as you are now
But there was something written above your brow
Branded to your forehead
Were the letters FHP
And you were holding a bottle of whiskey
When you talked spittle shot from your mouth
I ducked and dodged about
But your virus finally caught hold me
I could feel it growing
This disease

When I awoke
My hands were around my throat
Thinking I couldn’t breathe
But then I realized it was just a dream
And now you
The woman who knocked on my door
I’m not so sure it was just a dream anymore
Are you sure you’re just here for your cats
Not my soul
Eating at my insides like rats
Go away please
Leave me in peace
So I can sit here in my isolated misery
Waiting to sleep
To dream
Jack Bronson May 2020
Why do I cry
This sadness comes from a place in me
Untouched by reality
So deep it might of started centuries ago
All I know is you are here with me
The sadness
All I know is that these tears are real
As real as my breath
My blood
Oddly enough
This feeling gives me solace
Perhaps because I know I’m alive
More than any moment before
I am alive
Locked away behind these closed doors
Jack Bronson May 2020
My little girl
Not so little anymore
Oh how I love you so
A beaming light of joy
Bouncing
Running
Playing around this house
The vision of you
Makes me feel like life itself is looking right at me
The whole world focused on this moment
Makes me feel that every wrong I ever committed was right
Because without them I wouldn’t have you here with me
Makes me feel that everything ever done
Even before me was me
Was all worth it
Life opening up before me
Like a flower in spring
Like a child’s hand
Like a fawn opening its’ eyes for the first time
All of it is more than just right
It’s what's supposed to be
And so you are supposed to happen to me
My love
The unquestioned part of my life
Happy birthday
Jack Bronson May 2020
So much information out there
Bombarded by information
What am I to believe?
So many people with an agenda
With a motive for their point of view
So many wanting to gain or maintain power
Who do I believe?

It seems
More and more
I can only believe in myself
My body
For truth is in the body
Every thought
Every sensation
Every emotion
Those are the facts of me
I can be certain of those
Not that they are true
But they are true that they came to be

Behind all these thoughts
Feelings
Emotions
There is a viewer
An observer
That which is not me
Prior to the thought of me
Apriori

It is the place of non being
The place where all of this
This world
These facts
These gestures of humanity
Are born of
When I sit quiet
I feel this truth
But as soon as I try to reveal it to you
It’s gone
Like a bird when I reach out to catch it
It Flys away
just out of reach
Jack Bronson Apr 2020
My wife and I rented a house in what we thought was a good neighborhood
We were there for only a couple of months before we were burglarized
Who ever it was kicked in the side door into the garage
And since we never locked the door from the house to the garage
It was an easy way in
They didn’t take much
The Xbox
The laptop
But it was the fact that someone broke into our home that ****** me off
That had never happened to me before
We figured it was someone that was watching the house
They had broke in at exactly the time we would be out

We had bought our daughter her first bike that year for Christmas
A Dora themed bike with training wheels
glittery tassels
And a bell that hardly worked
I had taken her out riding in the cul de sac
Down the street we went
Me by her side

That’s when I see this little Mexican lady
She’s coming out of this house
And she has this look on her face
I didn’t know right then what that look was
Only that it was familiar
It was only later did I realize it was shame

This house I had been suspicious of
Ever since we had been burglarized
Cars pulling up to the house
Idling
Someone goes in quick and comes back out just as fast
The car takes off
Drugs deals going on there daily

I had thought for months
That if anyone stole anything from our house
They had something to do with this house
Just my gut telling me things

So then this little mexican lady shuffles to the end of the cul de sac
To the gate where she meets this guy
He passes something over the fence to her but I can’t tell what it is
I’m busy with my daughter going the opposite way down the street
By the time I turn around and head back to our house
The guy
Young guy about 25
And the woman are walking toward me
We just so happen to be passing in front of the drug house at the same time
Him going in one direction
Me in another

And there he is
Holding in both of his arms
A backpack with a small flat screen tv
The cords wrapped around it
It’s the afternoon
In complete and unmasked daylight
I just watch him
This look of “what the ****” on my face

What’s up man he says
Nothing I say
Just seeing you walk into that house with stolen merchandise
I know I shouldn’t have said anything
I should have just kept my mouth shut
But that voice in my head was shouting
This is the ******* right here!
Well he didn’t like that
What said that to him

What business is it of yours
Are you a ******* cop
I could have got this at the pawn shop
And on and on
He’s coming closer to me
Me and my daughter
I tried to ignore him
Tried to walk away
But he just kept coming
The woman
Who I think was his mom
She was telling him, “la nina, la nina”
He just shrugged her off and kept coming
Kept cussing at me
Who the **** do you think you are

I think it was the papa bear in me
The papa bear that’s in every father
Every parent
when their child is in perceived danger
******* you don’t know who your ******* with
I say
I’ll ******* up
This is where he starts to back up
But I’m not finished

I’m going to take me daughter to my house
Meet me there so I can kick your ******* ***
He’s all the way to the front door by this time
His mother trying to push him into the house
Him with a look of “what the ****” on his face

I take my little girl back to the house
I go and sit down on the trunk of my car
Waiting
Someone comes out of the house and looks in me direction

I’m right here I say
My arms raised up to the sky
Moments later my wife comes out
What are you doing?
You’re not a teenager
Do you want to lose job
And on and on until I completely feel like a five year old
Dejected
Until finally I get off my ***
Walking behind my wife into the house
I take one last look toward the drug house but there’s no one there

Later when I calmed down
My wife tells that when she asked my daughter where I was
She said I was outside
That I was speaking some other language to some man down the street
Jack Bronson Apr 2020
Her
I think of you
Every now and again
I can’t believe that you're gone
Funny though
It’s been so long that I think you might walk through the door

All I have is memories
I don’t even have pictures
Your letters
All those letters
Thrown away years ago
As I was cast away
Really
I cast myself away

I feel responsible
And in a way I am
But I am a fact among factors
So many circumstances bearing down on all of us at one time
It is comical to think that I am that one circumstance
Out of so many
That tipped the scales
To make you do what you did

But still
I wasn’t there when you needed me most
There was a time when we were both so young
When we found solace from the world in each other
In our words
In our arms
On our lips

You were it for me
It was the happiest time of my life
I reach out in front of me to that phantom face
The face in mind
The face forever enshrined within the impossible

I know I will never sit with you again
Hold you again
Kiss you again
And so I sit here waiting for time to take me
As one day it will
But between this day and that
You will go on in me as a light shines at night
For all of us live within the hearts of others
As you live in mine
Jack Bronson Apr 2020
The east side
The drug pushers
Pimps
And hoes
The ***** alleys ways
Grass growing up through every single nook
Crevice
And crack of the imagination

The east side
How I love you
Only there I can see a homeless black ******
Gingerly crossing the street
Only there do I see men walking
Holding their beers
Wrapped up in brown paper bags
Where the Latina girls wear large hoop earrings
Dark make-up and hair
The black girls with their red lipstick

The east side
Smelling of dirt and ****
The internal engine of the city
The cracked houses
The homeless riding electric wheelchairs in the middle of the street
The tagged walls
The abandoned houses
The sign throwing
The shootings
The stabbings
The killings

The east side
Don’t ever change
I need you
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