painkillers and poets
disillusioned, empty, completed,
what are these words doin’ here, man,
what do they want?
i got back pain, eyes hurt,
ears infected with conversations
i am too brilliant to ignore,
you know?
how about a football game
and some brain silence?
how about crispy spaghetti and no one writes
about colors or feelings
or some new amatuer epiphany.
i am just tired and itchy.
i don’t enjoy excessive thought.
drown me in a lake
too shallow for rhyme schemes,
stroke the slime from my hair
while whispering
xanax strangled the sonnet,
morphine poisoned the haiku,
heroin subdued shakespeare
with a slang tainted shotgun.
maybe heaven is texas,
ain’t no S2, L3 edits goin’ on there, right?
i got back pain, eyes hurt,
over-stimulated and under-medicated.
when you’re thirty-eight
whiskey just ain’t enough anymore.
sometimes when i look at the kitchen sink
i see parallel universes of inconsistent measure
beating bump-bump-bump,
the only cure is to break a plate or double the dose.
and the doctorS already comment
on my furious liver
and flagrant use of angry punctuation.
when i die it’s going to look like this:
….
….
….
….
with a bloated face and crooked fingers.
i beg for nausea and blank pages,
rotten teeth and prose.
i miss psychotic paranoia and dime novels,
O.D. funerals and grocery lists.
whatever happened to a beer and a shot
supplying the insight of juke-box lyrics
and mascara maidens?
when did i lose it?
the prescriptions or the poems?
i got back pain, eyes hurt,
got no desire for sex because i’m too comfortable
and words simply taste like human thigh.
my world is busy with cannibal notebooks,
voyeuristic FEDS,
symphonies of deviate behavior
distract the neighbors
as i pack my bags for texas.
double-dosing was a good idea.
S6, L1 has a typo.
Derek Richards