I woke up in the garbage and my head was in a whirl.
I smelled a little fishy so I knew I met a girl.

My shirt was pretty tattered so she must have been a catch.
The chicks I like to go for always tend to bite and scratch.

What’s your poison, Judas?
Manhattan! I find myself now an integral component of the strangest coalition of strangers anyone could possibly imagine, from all different countries and backgrounds and walks of life, now wandering about, underneath and in and out of the streets and back alleys of this city of sin, from the fish markets to the brothels--

What’s your poison, Judas?
Irish Coffee! Never before has there been a better time to wake up, fling open the shutters of the musty, ancient houses on Main Street and smell the gorgeous plainness of the morning breeze in spring laced with simple undertones of violets and honey and dew all contained in a material essence of the awe-inspiring wonder of this perfect, elegant world--

What’s your poison, Judas?
Sidecar! Here I am riding with the king of kings to the great stone castle atop the hill with the peach trees and the plum trees and the juniper bushes out back that holds luxurious ***** in the luxurious ballroom every Saturday evening where all the loveliest of girls come to drink and dance and to rendezvous to the frozen pond on the edge of the property--

What’s your poison, Judas?
Old Fashioned! Those smug supercilious charlatans way down by the river at the old boys’ club with their tailored suits and their waxed mustaches all get mighty offended every time some young gun with an hopeful persuasion tries to stir the ***, tries to just start a ripple, dips his raw, gentle hand in the bowl for a measly ******* second--

What’s your poison, Judas?
Planter’s Punch! You’d think that we were common thieves by the way that we’ve been received lately, brutally being beaten like insolent slaves, earning scars on my back and my hands as punishment for speaking my mind, and sharing the wisdom I’ve been given while I toil in this unrelenting desert sun, hungry, poor and fatigued--

What’s your poison, Judas?
French 75! Tormented by the cruel pangs of doubt in the face of adversity, I wish day in and day out that I could keep the faith in this enterprise I had when we first began, but the suffering has become simply too miserable to bear any longer and I now feel a tremor in my bone marrow that urges me towards the rebellion on the horizon like a yellow-bellied turncoat--

What’s your poison, Judas?
Whiskey Sour! The air may be cold, and the winds may whip with biting fervor, but with every breath I desperately drag into my heavy, tar-coated lungs to cleanse myself with icy purity this bitter taste still refuses to surrender or concede, and my villainous mouth remains a moist, infectious cesspool harboring the basest of vicious, vile vermin and crawling roaches--

What’s your poison, Judas?
****** Mary! You could scrub the callous palm clean off of my left hand with a hideous clump of rusty, jagged steel wool and wash the wound through and through with vinegar and Borax and this cursed, godforsaken spot on my conscience and on my very soul wouldn’t fade a half of an inch, only sink itself deeper in the flesh and shoot out its brutal clawlike hooks--

What’s your poison, Judas?
Jack Rose! The sorry ******* ******* was doomed, ******, destined for the doghouse from his first innocent and infantile breath, but after thirty good years I had to be the unlucky one the powers chose to fulfill the predictions of the powers' sons, I had to put the leaded bullet in his bleeding back, I had to pull the devilish trigger, and testify--

What’s your poison, Judas?
Last Word! Is there nothing you can do to please just take it far away from me, where I can’t see it, where I can’t even imagine it, where it might as well not even exist, where someone who needs it can have it, where that someone is anybody with a lick of morality, anybody but a back-stabbing, treasonous, perverted, weaseling, ****-of-the-earth Benedict--

What’s your poison, Judas?
Wine with gall.

Washed up on the sandy beach
amidst the summer rain,
The mighty king of the Pacific
lay in persecuting pain.
The creature wailed with ***** prowess,
but his health was soon to wane,
And by the morning that came after,
sovereign was reduced to stain.

Vultures from the distance
ripped apart his tender flesh
With spit to sear his wounded majesty
and claws to tear and thresh.
The wicked gang of savage butchers
in a loathsome, boorish mesh
Would make a swollen, seething carcass
of our one-time Venkatesh.

Three days after passing,
fallen Caesar, set to rise,
Was then revoked his Heaven’s passage,
and left wallowed in demise:
A body plagued by every virus;
swarmed by avaricious flies,
Stranded, rotting, in the Earth realm,
‘stead of claiming his due prize.

Hurricanes, October,
brought the wrath of Davy Jones
To wreak an evil-minded havoc
and to thrive on victim moans,
And dash the Herculean skeleton
upon the crags and stones
To rain on thousands with the splinters
of his elephantine bones.

A twisted body: neither man nor god
Was he, but rather ‘brute’ and ‘beast’ and ‘thing.’
Jove saw the creature worth naught but to fling
From heaven; landing face-down in the sod.
The Quasimodo--set ‘gainst every odd--
Found in this dreadful winter chance of spring.
He lusted after one day being king,
And saw his ruined body rightly shod.

Yet fortune saw the noble hero doomed
In giving him a wife with supple breast
And pretty face. There, in the distance loomed
The lame, repugnant blacksmith’s only test.
From jealousy sprung rage; abuse assumed,
When war-like Mars her hourglass caressed.