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Carl Sandburg  Feb 2010
Portrait
(For S. A.)TO write one book in five years
or five books in one year,
to be the painter and the thing painted,
... where are we, bo?
  
Wait-get his number.
The barber shop handling is here
and the tweeds, the cheviot, the Scotch Mist,
and the flame orange scarf.
  
Yet there is more-he sleeps under bridges
with lonely crazy men; he sits in country
jails with bootleggers; he adopts the children
of broken-down burlesque actresses; he has
cried a heart of tears for Windy MacPherson's
father; he pencils wrists of lonely women.
  
Can a man sit at a desk in a skyscraper in Chicago
and be a harnessmaker in a corn town in Iowa
and feel the tall grass coming up in June
and the ache of the cottonwood trees
singing with the prairie wind?
Bootleggers on Sunday evening  ,  a little pink house on Kelleytown Road !  Waiting by the cattle gate , taking money  , calling back to the house via radio ! Waving customers through , one by one , driving by the shack without braking once , trunk wide open , in goes the whiskey , slammed shut , out the back gate , and off they went !  Sheriff Donald didn't seem to have a clue , alcohol sales on late Sunday afternoons ? For forty odd years this house became a legend , Councilmen , Deputies and Mayors knew of it's existence ! Cars from distant counties all over the state , flying up dirt roads leaving dust in their wake ! It was surely without doubt , the entire county convinced that the Sheriff drew a months salary on Sunday evenings !
Copyright October 10 , 2015 by Randolph L Wilson * All Rights Reserved
Classy J  Oct 2016
Word play
Classy J Oct 2016
Classy came, classy continually and confidently game. Future fame, fan fever is frantically and fanatically insane. Mr. Maniacal making machine like maneuvers, knocking down all these rappers who are no more than bootleggers. One to monitor, rap game I have just commandeered, don’t give two ***** if I become popular. Baa, Baa, Boom, better make room, no time to go to the restroom, it’s time for hope to bloom. I will literally die if I can’t help change this demented land, not here to command or demand; I’m here to expand and give struggling people a hand. Power will throw a fit if you try to abuse it, not a time to split, for giving up is the worst crime to commit. Time to make the fire run wild, time to leave all things holding you back to be exiled.  I know it’s not exactly a walk in the park, I know that making a change in your life can be as hard as hitting a target in the dark. There are seasons that are bright, there are seasons that are dim, there are people who bring light, and there are people who are just grim. Is there such a thing as good hate or bad love? Could there be such a things as determined fate or sad dove’s?

Are humans just wise fools? Are we truly kind, when we choose to rather be cruel? Life is bittersweet, not happy even if you’re in the master suite, not happy because we all secretly feel we are not complete. Painfully beautiful, awfully lucky, bountifully barren, oh how much I love living in sweet agony.  I tried to whistle in the dark, but people are a wreck they need some real fine tuning, they need more than just one little spark. As all eyes start to loom, as I slowly tame all the shrews, as I continently battle with all these thoughts filled with gloom. You need to have some real big long teeth to get through some ****, its takes more than wit, if you don’t commit; you will lose all of it. Saucy punctilious wenches, so dicey, so spicy, just inches from reaching all your potential senses. Reaching the very edges of what is possible, living in a time that has done what was once thought implausible.

Sometimes I wish I was a Solomon with some of my decisions, sometimes I just forget to put my foot in my mouth, which usually leads to head on collisions. I have an ambition, before rap I never had a position in society, but now with this transition I got some notoriety.  Never wanted to be in the spotlight, I just wanted to write, I just wanted real freedom and equal rights.  Here come the dots, what, you kidding, you aren’t seriously thinking that some humans are actually modified robots? Hustling so hard, you can call me Rick Ross, rhymes so fresh from yours truly: The Classy boss. Getting between the cracks like dental floss, cutting through all this corruption as if it were moss. Strong and steady, this is not a gong show, so please don’t bring out the confetti. If you want to be healthy you best eat your veggies, if you don’t want wedgies learn how to fight because life isn’t nice and sweet like cherries or strawberries. Time to be edgy, so it’s time to get rid of all of your teddies. Jaded by all of the junk, jealous insecure jocks aren’t worth your time, so don’t be afraid to let loose your groovy funk.
There is a supermarket of feelings
Beautiful buildings lined with bottles racked on shelves.
Marked with labels and brands of different feelings.
Samples are given in tiny cups.
They don't flavor the deep thirst that's inside the heart.
The heart checks out each label and their side effects.
Chances made.
Until the contents expires and becomes a bottle with a defect.
There are thousands of brands
Thousands of Feelings to choose from.
Each moment deserves a different taste.
Pick a bottle.
For the moment there is no time to waste.
There are many shoppers lining the isles.
How many different worlds they have come from.
They have fought to be here for a routine way
for the taste of a new feeling.
As they have become numb to their own unique flavors made like
backyard bootleggers.
The selection was worth the trip over the longest of miles.
The the drink you have chosen hits the heart.
Once the effects of such dissapppear
It's time to go back and pick another
at the unique Feelings Soda Bottle Shop.
Now, from another flask, we drink the numb down to a nill
Until the choice of a favorite flavor is found amusing the others.
Michael Marchese Mar 2019
I'm not cut out
From the cloth
Of the beggar
No morally purer
Than drunken bootleggers
Don't claim to be better
Than junkies
And thieves
And in fact
Often share
In their proclivities
When my conscience agrees
To be righteously wrong
For the sake
Of forsaken
Virtues, all along
I have known to be merely
In theory
No more
Than the voice
In the back of my head
I ignore
When imploring me to
Ask it
What would God do?
Perhaps suffer the many
And save but a few
Of the most loyal supplicants
Bowing to none of it
Proving the makers
Who made us
Are done with it
Wk kortas Nov 2020
i.

There isn't much light when you're inside,
Or at least in terms of natural light,
And if you're looking for a star to guide you
Through your thirty days, you're even more out of luck
Than you were getting here in the first place,
(In my case appropriating--almost-- a turkey breast
The Saturday after Thanksgiving,
Figuring no tired, overworked checkout girl
Would ever miss it; **** poor luck, nothing more)
The windows too narrow to climb out,
Too high to smash in anger or frustration.
Still, you can catch a bit of the outside world
The sky (this once, at least) more blue
Than mid-December has any right being
In this grubby, hardscrabble corner of northwest P-A,
***** old lake to the west,
Endless logged-out hills to the east,
Never-quite-boomed mill towns due south,
Up north Indian land where bootleggers and number-runners
Holed up once upon a time, the Senecas
Now having gone legit, Beach Boys and Barbara Mandrell
Fronting shell games which bear the Feds' seal of approval.
This is the Galilee to which I shortly return.

ii.

Time gets syrupy in the hole, moving slowly, lazily,
Fighting the laws of Newton and Einstein at every turn,
And when the ******* about lawyers,
The oft-repeated and off-key done-me-wrong songs
And respectful if somewhat impatient
Supplications to Jesus for speedy deliverance
Are no longer sufficient distraction,
A man begins to think and remember.
I met Easy Terry E. (so he called himself)
In the city lockup in Troy, or maybe it was Schenectady
(I have, after all, mosied up and down the Eastern Seaboard,
On both sides of the bars)
And let me tell you, for the only time in my born days
I wished these small-city holding cells had solitary,
As Terry E. not only had a chalkboard-scrape falsetto
Which constituted aggravated assault on the eardrums,
But also a predilection for non-stop yammering
About nothing and everything, punctuating his blather
With frequent high-pitched insistence
That he was a hermaphrodite,
And he would frequently taunt the guards by yowling
Baby, I got a lady's equipment down here.
Maybe you want to strip search me, honey
.
(Such high spirits led to an inevitable outcome;
I heard a jailer up in Utica decided to quiet him down
By sticking Terry's head in a toilet, the swirlie
Ending up a minute or two longer than was advisable)
But I had been able to more or less ignore him,
As to that point he'd concentrated on ******* off
Everyone in the cells with the exception of me,
But my turn came soon enough
Oh, don't worry Peter, darling, I know your type.
Different, smarter than the rest of us

He all but sang in  my direction.
Mebbe so, I grumbled, just a few fluky bad breaks
Here and there, that's all
.
Terry laughed and clapped his hands,
Poor sweet thing, a victim of that old lousy karma.
There was a philosopher

And he stopped for a moment,
Seemingly trying to pick a name from the air
(Not that he could see anything floating in front of him,
As he wore horn-rims with lenses as thick and opaque
As the headlights of a '72 Skylark.)
So you're just taking a break here until your luck turns, mmm?
I laid back against the wall,
Hands behind my head and grinned.
Yep, I replied, things are due and then some
To start going my way
.
Terry giggled once more, Well, you've got things
All figured out then!
Good, evil, right, wrong--just snapshots of the roulette wheel
In some infinitesimal sliver of time, and all we can do
Is put our chips down and hope the croupier is playing it straight.
Well, now that you've finally figured all that out,
I suspect you won't see the wrong side of the bars again
.
And with that he turned his back on me,
Paying me no mind whatsoever
Until they turned me loose the next morning
With the stern admonishment
To trouble the good citizens of the Capitol District no more,
And as I think back to that moment,
I suspect he may not have been telling the whole truth
As he saw it.

iii.

And so I will be released from this small cell
In this small red-brick building
In the midst of this equally small red-bricked town,
And I will bypass the bars
With their potential for a cheap hustle
And various types and flavors of low-hanging fruit,
And I will dispense with a seat on some sad Trailways bus,
Seeking a ride (thumb hopefully, defiantly
Pointing upward to the sky)
On the old Grand Army Highway,
Then north on the Buffalo Road
And I will clamber down the embankment
To the Kinzua Dam and, shedding socks, shoes, and clothing,
And hang the cold,
I shall wade into the water, acclimating ankles and washing feet,
The dive headlong under the water's surface
To arise cold, cleansed, ready to move onward.
Man  Oct 2022
DNA
Man Oct 2022
DNA
many intertwined lineages
have I been the result of
from whence my people have come
the wealthes of their lives
the zero and sum
rail-men, bootleggers, c.e.os and c.f.os
simple tradesmen and
practitioners of medicines
and am I of the most reticent
to commitment

— The End —