Jaundiced City Nights

The night was mine once
but the city took it away
and washed it in a phosphorescent orange
that seeps in through the cracks in the blinds
and on the backs of the roaches.

And my silence,
that anthem of my peaceful solitude,
that too belonged to me.
But now we share it
as the sound of the distance and the hatred
that grows between us.

Looking around from the creaky balcony
where I go to escape you
I catch the last moments
of a generation.

The eerie glow of their cellphones
cast green shadows.
I listen, anticipating a ghost story
or some dreamy reflection

but all they do is shrug, sigh,
and mumble "whatever"
as they type their suicide texts

ttyl, cruel world.

I drink to everyone of them.
I raise my glass to every glint
of their dead eyes
grumbling Cheers to each.

And the more I drink
the more this balcony railing resembles
the bars of a penitentiary
and this apartment complex,
a panopticon.

"Lights out!" shouts the Warden who is never seen.
but he can't seem to find the switch.

Unemplyment

Time to shave this beard, this mark of unemployment, and get off the floor where I've spent most of the month. Time to put my tongue back in my skull and wake up.
If I still had friends, they'd say "Wow, Lizard, it's good to see you sober.  We're proud of you"
and I'd fail to mention that my vices only ended when I ran out of money.

How much time has passed?  A week?  A year?  And how much more is left?

Fast Loris, my lover, sits in the darkness of our modest apartment staring at me and wishing I were someone else.  I stand in front of the bathroom mirror doing the same.

"Have you heard back from anyone yet?" she asks, masking the bitterness well.

I don't answer.  I haven't spoken in so long that my lips have crusted shut.

White Rat

Pile of trembling
white hair
in the corner of the room.

No one sees you.
No one watches you

chew through your tail
but I.

The people around me
have gone senseless.
Their eyes dart around
too fast for their brains.

Their teeth grind
furiously, mechanically,
as if the factory were not dead at all.
They are killers.

White rat,
it is only by watching you
that I can breath steady
even as you unfurl

and scurry clumsily away
from your mutilated remnant
matted with blood
and filth.

And yet you are still
less repulsive
than the other occupants
in this hell.

And small enough to escape it.

Puppets on her fingers

She only spoke to me
through the finger puppets
that she wore on her hands
like jewelry.

Their tiny faces were bruised
from the keys of her piano,
and none of them seemed in the mood
to chat.

In fact,
they, like a gang
of felt pigmies,
held my head under the dish-water

until I slumped unconscious
to the floor
with wet bits of food
in my beard and hair.

Summer tomb

Vines crawl across the screen panel above me.  Shamefully pale, the night hides its face from us.

I’m standing at the deep-end of a drained pool staring at the scene in front of me; the algae speckled walls around and the moon peeking through the vines above.  At my feet there is a jet black puddle.  Cigarette butts glow like stars in the flotsam, then I’m no longer looking into a puddle of grime but into space.  I forget the party going on around the empty pool.  Their voices become distant memories remembered. 

I imagine everywhere else as abandoned as the scene laid out before me.

The rusted ladder squeaks horribly as I climb it to the surface to tell the people of my vantage point from the bottom of the derelict pool, along the precipice of a black-hole.  They look at me as one does the homeless doomsday prophets of the city or they look disinterested.

Someone says they’d rather not get their clothes dirty.  I notice I’m the only one here wearing a suit but I say nothing about it.  Instead I ask: “Don’t you want to know a freedom from yourself?  Wouldn’t you like to stand on the brink of infinity and look down?” but no one answers.  They are all distracted; laughing their heads off at a drunk who fell in a bush. 

”Haha,” they say, “haha.”

Where you sat

There was an awkwardly placed chair in the living room.  Only three of us knew that it covered a gruesome blood stain.  We played charades all night.  We pretended things were different.  We smiled with hooks through our cheeks and attached to strings that dangled from the ceiling like torn spider webs.  The humidity gave everything a moldy smell.  The air itself seemed dead and rotting.  These were supposed to be the vivacious summers of our youth but no one felt very young.  We were twenty something and already silver-headed from our toil, poverty, and fear for our many precarious situations.  Our lives were reflected in mirrors tossed from the twentieth story of a condemned building.  From the porch at strange hours we watched puffs of white smoke emerge from a distant alley like ghosts.  I imagined us beacons on the shore of the river Styx.  Always in our pockets we kept two coins for the ferryman who had taken a wrong turn down 1^st street and was late again.

Black Bile

It came oozing from her mouth as she spoke and my ears as I listened.  
It dripped onto the floor in ink-black puddles of trepidation.  I wanted to silence the beating of my heart, because I knew that it was the tribal drum that wakes the creature at the bottom of the bitter black depths.  From the dark parts of ourselves hands began to emerge, clawing at the smoke that filled the small room.  
Our shadows leaked from our faces and started to act of their own accord.  
From her expression I could tell that she did not see them or else she was in league with them.  She spoke, but I couldn't understand her.  I just nodded my head politely and waited for whatever it was we were waiting for.