Spring's rain and winds have blown away;
Summer has died and Autumn too.
But in the sad emptiness of my heart
Winter beckons me to its cold embrace.
It is now so many long Decembers past
Since I lost the one true love of my life;
No, she did not die, I cast her out proudly
As she refused to leave her unloved spouse.
A victim of religious hypocrisy.
And now we both dread the future on our own,
Self-pitying victims of our idiotic pride.

In the mid-1990s I worked as a bartender
on the second floor of a local hotdog joint
near the University of Pittsburgh.
I poured beers and mixed simple drinks
for working class drunks.
The felons always had a game or a magic trick
they’d use to milk rubes for a free gin and tonic.
College students mostly stayed away,
but the ones who stumbled in ordered drafts,
paid for by daddy’s allowance
or the petty drug rackets they ran on campus.
In the summer, the best ***** came around,
**** pushed out of their tops,
*** cheeks crept below their skirts.
They knew how to find action
every single night.

Except one overweight girl named Susie
from the all girl’s school down the road.
She’d come to the bar alone,
her lips caked with dark red lipstick.
Like many students, Susie wanted to be older.
She’d order ***** martinis,
drink quietly, and she’d patiently wait
for one of the older drunks to make a move.
It never happened.

Sometimes Susie complained to me
about other girls at her college,
that they were aggressive lesbians.
All of them wanted to eat her ******.
‘Those ******* are as bad as the men,’ she’d say.
But then she’d laugh it off.
‘I really love ****,’ she told me.
‘I think about **** and *** all the time.’

One night Susie owed the bar $27.50.
She always tried to flirt her way past the tab.
I never let her get away with it.
‘Do you like me?’ she said.
I laid down my trademark response,
‘You’re the best.’
‘No, do you really like me?’
I figured she deserved a real compliment.
‘You have the sexiest lips here.’

She climbed off the barstool
and walked to the backdoor, the fire escape.
She then curled her finger at me to join her.
Outside on the small rusted iron landing,
above the roach-filled dumpster,
Susie crouched between my legs.
Both of us worked to unbuckle my belt.
A swarm of hands pulled down my jeans.
I looked up at the few stars between buildings
as those red lips and soft tongue became my drug,
a back alley escape from a ******* life.
When I unloaded, she refused to let go.
She swallowed it all. $27.50 paid in full,
plus tip.

That’s how we went for a while.
I gave Susie small escapes from lesbians.
Susie gave me small escapes from life.
Eventually, she stopped coming around.
I figured she graduated.
Perhaps her classmates finally got their wish.
Either way, I never saw her again.

A poem by my friend Stan Blackberg (the total ******)

There are flowers standing proudly, one for each whose loved ones mourn,
Speaking out so clear and loudly, for that fateful treacherous morn,
When the aircrafts bashed them up and all their flesh got burnt & torn!

Do we honour them with killing, taking up arms to spill more blood,
Or take lesson if we’re willing, a bitter pill for common good,
Or sit unbeguiled with our faces stuffed with fattening food?

There’s no god would take such action, justify such murderous deed,
Those insane within such factions, find posthumously they heed,
It's upon such wickedosity that our nostrils froth and bleed.

Hear the painful hard earned lesson, lest their names we desecrate,
Take not slaughter as your banner making killing escalate,
And by no means forget to have a mutual *******!

Place our sentries all united, shed thee not another drop,
Silence now all angry gunfire, when’s the killing ever stop.
And the blood falls from above with a loudish plip and plop.