I have written so much ****** poetry across this city;
left it in bars, under streetlights, and
In the bathrooms where people have ****** all over the toilet seats and I had to use my poems to clean it up.
They are on napkins and receipts; pieces of toilet paper, and even a one-liner on the carcass of a piece of paper that once held a straw.
The words get soggy on wet bars and bloom like black flowers losing all consistency and coherence.
Sometimes I write them out of pure impetus.
To get me going, I need a couple beers and those Pabst-drinking, past-drunk drunk girls that get close up to you and put their lips on your earlobes like they want to tell you a secret
But all you get is a present of soft stinging breath.
Sometimes I write them for some girl I meet, like the one who came up and sat down right beside me.
She said her name was so and so.
I said my name was so and so,
so we got to talking
And the topic finally reared its fat, ugly head:
“Are you going to school?”
“Yea I go to State”
“Oh that’s cool, whats your major?”
“Creative writing”
Then she smiles at me like I’ve got some broccoli in my teeth,
and she wants to figure out a way to tell me
without breaking this three-beer-good-buzzing mood,
finally she says:
“write me something”
And I become a dog for her.
In my doggish way I take my tail out of my pocket and tuck it's wiggling self onto a napkin.
I write about how meeting someone new, is like trying to figure out if what you’re looking at is a skyscraper or a mountain, or just a Norfolk freight train barreling down the tracks with your name on it’s front grille.