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I walked to buy some Marlboro Reds
the kind I always used to smoke when I lived at home
with my parents
"Cowboy Killers"
"Coffin Nails"
My mom would relentlessly criticize my choices.
I tried to drown myself most nights,
but my parents broke the lock on my bathroom door
and stopped me, taking to a country hospital in-patient
facility.
I felt alone, and my shoes were stripped of laces.
But I drew a picture in an art therapy session
of my car driving over a bridge
like the one I'm crossing now,
that spans a creek I don't notice for the first time.
It was a clear day, in my picture, but I had been stripped
of my car keys, as well.

It is a clear day today, too, but it is still Nebraska
and the wind is blowing
and I still want to swerve into traffic, on foot.

My family liked my picture, and made allusions
to helping me cross this metaphorical bridge.
No one asked me about the way I imagined the bridge ending,
how I would fall over the edge and die.
But I successfully crossed the overpass, alone,
my shoes permanently tied.

When I got to the counter, the cashier made me aware
that the prices had gone up since 2006.
I had expected this, but they were already expensive
before
for my body, for my lungs.
I was thirty
pounds overweight back then
and ate mostly fast food, and cheese tortillas,
but the body I carry now seems heavier.

I wear earplugs to combat
the unrelenting flow of traffic
and people going to their houses, families.
I try to fabricate a reason to tell my parents
I won't be there
for Thanksgiving.
But I can't,
I just won't go.

I walk harder now.
The trouble I had breathing
as a fat schmuck
remains
as a skinny schmuck
and I go back inside
to ask for matches at the counter.

I just want to smell the sulfur strike
it reminds me of the chemicals my father used at work
and it is extinguished by the Fall wind, like I knew it would.
But still, I stood behind the gray gas station
the red trim.
I find this oddly exhilarating
this moment,
this fading scent,
from failed matches,
reminds me of when I got a friend to buy me cigarettes
in middle school
and I hid them in my room, until my parents went away.

I took them and the matches, to my parents' porch
and smoked one, imagining my neighbors saw me
imagining they cared.
The crinkle of the foil, the match strike--
these were the experiences I wanted.
And the nicotine.
But I did not want the coffin nails
for the dead cowboys.

I had a lighter with me, though.
I knew I'd have to light one.
I pull it from my pocket and inhale.

I had removed my ear plugs to ask for the matches
and all I hear is wind and vehicles.
I start to walk across the bridge a second time
I spit on the dying grass
that hangs in the dry chill
between the cracking sidewalk
in front of a gas station employee
getting off
her shift.
Her shadow races mine, and I am going to win.

I don't feel the nicotine yet, but I expect it to
kick in
as I listen
for a sign of life, not drowned out by thoughtless travel
for a moment,
I hear some young birds, sqwuaking under the overpass
spanning a creek
no one takes time to look
but I do.
All that collects there is trash.
There was a torn, Tar Heels hat on a rock, in the water, once.

I start to think again. It's working.
I'm open
Enlivened by the sound of hatchlings,

I hear young birds!
But I can not see
an anachronistic Spring
in my step, I am sure
for the first time in weeks.
I imagine having hope
and stride, watching my shadow crash
against the concrete ditch, relentlessly.

Suddenly, I realize,
what I thought were baby chicks
bound to freeze
were clanging coins
in my pocket which
I couldn't distinguish
until I'd passed into a parking lot, away from cars.

My momentum faltered.
The ******* my knee-support lost its velcro hold
and before I knew it
I was under the leaf-less trees
where red berries dangled
and no squirrel felt brave enough to ****** them.
I thought of reaching up and grabbing one,
but I knew no one else would think this seemed brave.

I smoked the cigarette until it burnt my finger,
then put the **** in the receptacle beneath my stairs
and went inside.
Enabled by the substance, inside my body just ten minutes,
to write again
19 times.
MMXII
I saw you on the stage today
covering your *******.
You looked like me in some sad way,
bruised white thighs and bony chest.
I saw you on the stage today;
my belly filled with dread:
You looked like me, but gimmicky
and grimly oversexed.
(c) KEP, 2012

more stone(d) soup
 Nov 2012 Auroleus
Hands
there are cars in the street
and music fills the night;
Les Trois Gymnopedies
are vibrating in the air
and I just don't have a care;
I'm going to melt away
even though I was never there;
my thoughts cannot quite finish
I think I might be sick
I'm going to **** myself tonight
at least, I hope,
I wish
I sure put up a good fight
I placed my bread to heat for just five seconds--
behold: when I came for it, it wasn't alone.
A mayfly had set up camp (so to speak)
with my wheat bread, my most favored
Amish-baked, sliced-before-my-own eyes bread;
and when I say it "set up camp," I do not
mean anything pleasant.  I do mean six thin legs
sprawled long and broken when discovered
and perhaps some melted insides; who's to say?
Something turned inside of me and I'm certain
I grimaced at least a little, and took my plate back,
thinking, disturbed just slightly.  How had I not
seen the fly?  It couldn't have touched the bread--poor thing--
just rested there, unknowing, to be slaughtered.

"Mom...Mom...Ahh, uhh, Mom!  Mom?"
(mother assesses circumstances, unceremoniously takes a napkin
to my victim, and introduces his corpse to the garbage)
"He probably wasn't in there when I...right?"
--"It probably was."
"But five seconds couldn't have killed him."
I know I am wrong
as I feel the warm grains of my prize.
(mother gives a long look and says...)
--"If it heated the bread, I'm sure it heated the bug."


I took my bounty anyway--the bread, that is, mind you--
and went to eat it absentmindedly, but found that
now impossible.  Sigh.  I also found myself
staring, long and hard, then, at half of a piece
of glorious, Heaven-breathed wheat bread,
and suddenly realized that I could not discern
whether or not I was enjoying it.  ******.
And then I tried to reassure myself by chiding
inwardly, "You're just afraid of insects
irrationally," but maybe I actually
felt that the blood of an
innocent life was on
my hands.

Why are they so stupid? I ask
no one really, fighting revulsion,
grasping for blame.


Alas, I finished eating but felt rightly robbed
of some essential part of the experience.
Yet, such is life.
© K.E. Parks, 2012
 Nov 2012 Auroleus
L Smida
Sports have rules
Down to every little detail
Zoned in and ready to go
You do this and this happens
There are memorized plays
Your mind reacts automatically
Rules
Every game has them
I'm good at body control
Now, controlling my emotions
That's a different story
I wish life was as easy as sports
In life, theres endless possibilities
You do this and you have no idea what happens
Baseball, volleyball, and hockey
I can play all day long
Life
I'm sick of it already
Majestic is the scarab,
whose beauty persists
in the favor of people;
we behold it and say,
"How creative is God."
Mesmerized, I forget
how literally today
becomes yesterday--I forget
how potent a drug
beauty is.
(c) KEP
*****
After much evaluation,
I do not think
this place to be the trouble
or to warrant change.
I am the trouble, and I am
indelible from it.

Guilt inundates the mind
as a byproduct:
nausea and exhaustion are an
ungodly synthesis
indicative of something--
something...

And if I were given a dollar
at each instance,
I could buy a carton
of cigarettes.

At first, I thought that
funny.

Now I think I should not think
at all.
(c) KE Parks 2012
PSA
Stop arbitrarily replacing commas with semicolons.  Stop it.

Thanks everybody!
im not kidding though
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