My Salvation

I always think in
terms of more misery
than joy

there is joy and
plenty of it in life
but for me I think
too much of the difficult
times

than the happy
content times in
the past and possible
future

as for the present
I’m happy just not
to cry.

The Hair Starts Growing Upwards on the Neck (and therefore it should be shaved)

The beard grooming specialist
said if you don’t have a well
trimmed beard it means you
just don’t care.
Exactly, I said.

Death, The Final Frontier

I tired to remember
to forget.

Do the things we can
not think about.   Exist?
Only in infinity
and imaginations
and melatonin driven
dreams
outside the Universe,
probably.
Though it is said
by some, for eternity
to be real, any
combination or singularity
of thought is possible
and may have a possibility
of being reality,
if it can be thought.
And, if endless infinity
does hold sway,
since as it has
already
been said,
“The [present] Universe
is far stranger than
we can imagine” (Issac Asimov).
Unless, of course,
we consider eons
into the future,
when our Sun eventually
blows up/burns out/stops shining
and we have not transferred
to artificial intelligence
indestructible, non-aging,
self-rejuvenating some
type of organic or not
“machines,”
rather like
we are now,
but healing
much longer lasting
than we currently are, or
in a final analysis,
of course, if we are
mute-silent, and
very much
stone cold Dead.
Though even when expired
we
live as much-motion
atoms, nuclei, quarks.
It then appears,
if life, as well
as Death, we are
so gloriously
and persistently,
indestructible.
Recycling all the time.

 

Semisonic Closing time

 

Drifting into this: slower, slower…,

World – here, in this obscure

Subculture we live and breathe

Free of your 9 – 5.  The traffic jams

Never that far from your nose.

See me shuffling down Virginia

Avenue in these old shoes

In this midnight lullaby’s postcard dream.

Sleeping here and there

From the back of street bars

Occasionally woken by the piano

Player playing for beer and cigarettes.

Behind his sunglasses

His frontage knowing

Closing time brings him an end

To another day

As the night rolls out

The bar throws out

Into the ever longer

I pass by your window

As the last night bus

All life goes on – bars open again.

Now I’m smoking cigarettes
And I strive for purity
And I slip just like the stars
Into obscurity

 

Grapefruit Moon Tom Waits

 

 

Politics

 

Never thought

Peeing in our pants

Would feel good

 

The world drying up

With cold insincerity

 

Excrement running down

Our backsides

Leaving a trail

That even rats won’t follow.

 

 

State of the Union

 

After you run me over

Please back up

And finish the job

 

Don’t leave

A bleeding heart

Still alive in the gutter.

See Yourself Out

Get thee behind me!
Into the past where you belong.
Filed away under ‘Mistakes’
not ‘What Might-Have-Beens’
I hope the door hits you
on the way out… twice.
I shall ponder you
unnecessary no more.
You cease to exist
in the living, breathing
real world of today.
I glimpsed around
the front you hide behind.
Your honey-traps
and blasphemies
have lost their curiosity.
No more games & fishing,
emotional military advancements.
The magic bubble
of your preying attraction
just blew up in your own face.

© Paul Tristram 2016

Scene Two

 

The other day,

I was having a cigar

outside of a girlfriend’s house.

She lives in a demilitarized zone

where violent crime is day by day.

And out of nowhere this beautiful cream-colored

Porsche pulls up with the Jimmy John’s display sign

sitting atop of the car.

The guy behind the wheel looked like a former

company head: white, mid-fifties, lost and confused,

slightly suicidal, but not quite ready to throw in the towel.

And having survived the eight year political carnage

of neighborhood foreclosures, bankruptcies, and job losses,

she said, “now that’s one poor motherfucker.”

Young Love

When you were five
And I was six,
We would hold hands
Just like this.

When you were nine
And I was ten,
We made a pact
To never tell, and then:

You began to tell me every word
That escaped from your lips, with cold secret stares.
A look or a glance through long
Fingertips. Your beautiful face.

I see you sitting by the stair, your body
Tight in hot sun, a sad lamb
On stage. And when I have passed you
Flushed red raw, I want to remember

How young we were.
Splayed out across the pitch
Like baby starfish, pink and pinched
As tongue’s blood.

Our father and mother are in silent reverie,
With knotted wrists and electric hair,
Nodding and clapping, as dumb waiters do
To our games. When we are together we are together.

Today we are family as the ill
Walk in lines, with shaken smiles that marry us.
Mother, to me you are a figure of fun.
Father, you are a child when you wake up each morning.

 

Hello, I’ve been absent for a while. I had right shoulder replacement surgery, got home from the hospital, sat around for about twenty minutes, got up to get something from the kitchen, stepped on my left leg and broke it at the ankle. I went down, my shoulder experienced paroxysms of pain, and my foot flopped about awkwardly as I struggled to get back in my chair and phone for help. Meanwhile I tried to get my foot to pop back in. Nothing doing. I waited with sideways foot, excruciating pain, shoulder sutures bleeding and a regal bearing. Apparently physical pain I can handle; it’s mental pain that slays me. Even the ambulance driver said I was a tough guy.

 

I’m in an in my home convalescence period now and the problem is I’m having problems concentrating and for thirteen days I didn’t write. But now that’s changing, until the pain and a general don’t move and only watch TV hopeless sort of impulse comes over me again, and I disengage from even reading activity. I can barely play guitar. I tried and though my jam partner said it sounded good, I couldn’t go on. The home health care worker asked me if I was depressed and I said yes. I’m in a wheelchair, my shoulder is infected and draining, I’m eating antibiotics and on Monday at 8:00 AM I go back for an emergency appointment with the doctor if I don’t go to ER sooner. What’s more, I ran out of weed. I’m trying for brutal honesty here. If it’s too much for you, hey stay anyhow! Yee-haw!

 

I read some poetry. For me it was good poetry, but of course they published one of mine at Mad Swirl so I go there to read it and make me mistake of reading the other contributors works. They all were so good! And I’m wonderin’ “am I worthy?”

 

Stellar cats those other contributors. If I read too much really good poetry I start getting emotional inside. I start thinking so much so good out there. And I in no way do I want to push it to try to stack up and lose my poetry ubiquity. I must go beyond, below, and above, but not exactly too much with the general flow.

 

Now watch me heal, get even better than I was – more knowing of pain, injury and disability challenge – and head off into the Philippines to find a mate. As for you-all continue writing and sending poems. We’re addicted. Thank you all, lovingly.

 

Dr. Randall Rogers

7/23/2016

Rapid City, South Dakota, USA.

when an abortion doesn’t take

 

 

I never asked to be born.

 

So Pa,

you should have

shot me into

the sheets,

 

and Ma,

you never should

have received

the seed

 

of me,

 

because

afterbirth

was just a mess.

 

 

Previously published by The Camel Saloon.

 

We are still in search across the open plains for the best words to feature in The Best Of The Beatnik Cowboy Volume #2. All contributors selected and subscribers will also receive an additional book, the reincarnate of the “Black Tits” poems by Dr. Randall Rogers and Chris Butler.

Keep the Good Word cumming!