TheManFromNantucket

As insanity grips me with quaking fingers, I sit in my bed, eyes sanguine, whetted with countless horrors I could not correct. Viewing images of my failings dancing like sickly jesters before my conscience sitting in its slowly rotting throne, I desperately cling to things that are not shadows of a guilt-ridden mind. Yet like a plague it creeps through my very blood, turning the heat of passion as cold as winter's grasp and the quakes of anxiety into the steps of giants. I watch the children, broken from birth play with toys, wearing normality like a Halloween costume, but I know the gash beneath the mask because I've seen it, the inhumanity

Through the remnants of a life I walk, picking through trophies and other trinkets, looking for the center of a place I never was, nor ever will be smelling incense pirouetting from a wine bottle I'd kept for too long in the cellar forever ruined by that greedy and jaundiced tongue, everything tainted by its gluttonous expansion across the naked vision of a hundred portraits I'll never see again.

Chipped paint horses about a rotted plastic palace line the dreams of poor little Alice. ——————————————— The carnies would shout and the freaks would dance even the elephants got their chance. —————————————— Alice was sweet, her tastes, quite tricky she was known to be quite picky. ———————————————- No carny she'd pay nor elephant she'd view Even when they'd pas de deux ———————&

On these notes, I had a dream of a glass beneath the firework orange in the sky. On these notes I'd imagine words that I'd have to learn to forget words that would come after the clock struck 12, spiced rum on your breath - whisky on mine. But at midnight, my carriage became a pumpkin my horses rats and my feet never fit those damned slippers. So I am left, with little more than a filthy drunk's memory, bitter and broken beneath the weight, of a hundred words left unspoken.

Beautiful, yellow, poisonous Catharsis. Where would I be without thee. I can feel it pulsing on the windswept surfaces of my chapped and rotten skin. Its presence lurks in the flitting imagination that rests between a coffee cup and a wide open bottle of pills that I spilled over the lily white pages, the ones I intended to blemish with my letters and metaphors that are just as equally expressed by silence and a watchful eye. I sip at it cautiously as it bubbles over- a concoction made by a drunk and a witch and it fills me with Vegas purple and visions of business suits, bland ties. And oh I smell the chill of the prison my

The buzz is afloat, In the room lit by cigars; People in white and red, And a few in black Stutter their steps To the rhythm, Beneath a sparkling chandelier That plays games with the bubbles, Glasses of champagne contain. Sounds of bees and humming electronics Wrap them like a moth-eaten blanket, Paying close attention to the eyes. But their shoes, Are all clown's shoes, Clothes are all grey, And above them, the rafters hang with the hint Of celebration long since past, But that buzz keeps them Dancing and prancing In their rags and tophats. And the DJ is drunk So he can't drive home, So we'll play charades Until that d

The ford creeps north on scenic Grand Callou Road, Lake Boudreaux long faded in the southern horizon of an oil-stained skyline. The swamp watches their silent getaway with blood on its hands, pointing the way north towards Alabama. Dressed in a grey jumpsuit and a frayed Houma Bait n' Tackle baseball cap, he is leaving that ghost town behind him. His motorhand's eyes are gripped with desperation in the rearview mirror. They both have the oil spots on their clothes.                * * * The day is black. The trailer sits nervously on the town's limits, catching the first glimpses of a comforting sunrise. The rig came calling for him, a man

We all did our piece of the work when the winds and floodwaters ripped apart the city. My aunt Sandra kept her house full of stray cats, left behind in Katrina's awful wake. My uncle Terry sat there and drank as he always did, and my uncle Barry the engineer tore down and rebuilt his house that had filled to the roof with filthy water. We tore down the rotting houses with hammers and it felt like we were bringing down the great wall in Germany. No one was there to give us a speech though, except a couple of local judges. Sometimes, we'd find tattered pieces of history, like when we found a rusted tricycle with broken spokes in an alley east o

Siamese cat, Blue eye between patches of grey, Grease on its flank, Winding its way between the rubble And the roadside. And through the starvation, Beneath it's rickety ribs, Cat has a waddle in its waltz, From the pride it carries: Shown with a broken strut, And one sharp eye. King of Canal Street, But Regent of Rampart, Cat keeps his head From hanging low. Mangled as he may be, Life works in spite of us as it always did: A weed through the Cracks in moldy cement.