A man who confessed to being insane enough
a man who confessed to being insane enough
to live with beasts. that’s not fair to the beasts.
what he meant was human beings.
you could tell because he was obsessed with fire
rising between the trees, & there’s no beast
who comprehends this as obsessable— it is to be fled.
so he meant human beings. in any case,
he wasn’t the only prick in the world insane enough
to do what he confessed to, but we all brag in different
cadences; mostly he just makes me think: so what? &
beautiful… that’s beautiful…
i’ll tell you what: we only suffer
long enough to die alive. that’s all.
that’s enough reason to be insane. i, for my part, still prefer
beastly people to human beings, the living to the dead.
Here & Now
The age of silked pimps
Has ended; the age of the thug
Has begun.
The proof is in
The uneven thumping upstairs,
The angry shouts,
A fallen window,
Footsteps stamping down the ceiling plaster,
A broken bottle,
A slammed door unevenly shuddering back open into the hall,
A man’s feet on the stairs,
His jeans & Tshirt blurring through the December bushes,
His beater car peeling off,
& her weeping in the room above my bed
As the muffled radio pants for breath in the bathroom.
A cat peers in my window
& I throw a sock at it
Because it flirts with skunks
& the summer stink lingers
Like the smell of an unfaithful wife.
It is Christmastime & I have no work.
I hear the worst of it in the daytime.
Everyone else is at work.
They have families & ambitions of love.
Sometimes love isn’t enough.
Sometimes it is enough that the radio upstairs goes silent.
Sometimes the thugs
Make sense,
& that truly does hurt.
Steven lives in Canton, OH and enjoys red wines, whiskeys, art, poetry, music, etc., and time spent at dive bars talking to people who manage to get by in life somehow (neighbors). College was the biggest mistake he ever made successfully. Oh, well.
