Seeing Permanent Red

They say us red heads have
tempers like East Coast weather
unpredictable and vicious.

I would argue this point but
it would only send me into
another full blown raging whirl wind.

I turn into a Snickers-less Joe Pesci.
I become Oppenheimer.

Without a moment’s notice.
Even my Jekyll is more like
most people’s Hyde.

Today when I could not find my hat
I felt like I needed it
like some average Junky,
then the more I couldn’t find it,
the more I became Herbert Hunke.

Suddenly I was a barrel short
of 12 angry monkey’s.

I miss a bus and start mumbling
to my room:

“How in the history
of all the holiest fucks
of fucking fuckers
have I lost this goddamn hat
when I have yet to leave the
house today?”

The theories get elaborate, fast.
Some kind of starving, stray
micro-goat-like creature
which normally subsists off odd socks
has not found one lately and has
decided to get brazen.

I must still be wearing it I say,
and pat my red, slowly
sweat-gathering
heavy hair.
Nope.

I check the legs of jeans
startling my bed’s frame
like crusty farmer clothes on
rickety, birch fences.

My inner Shining
declares that
Genes got me here
to begin with.

I go to punch air
and I hit the corner of my door
gashing open my hand,
now I’m bleeding and
cursing and mumbling and
tossing clothes around
like a baglady at the last
Sally Ann sale of the Earth
positive that any second I will
start to shit out everything
I have ever lost
and that’s a lot, a lot, a lot of shit.

By the time I give up and
put my hoody on
I’ve missed another bus
I’ve screamed in italic’s of cuss
I’ve prayed like a desperate Catholic
to a Mexican pick up truck’s Jesus-rust.

Curse this temper of mine.
All it was ever good for
were broken Super Nintendo controllers
dry wall craters covered in NIN posters
and a good post-meltdown chuckle
like the one just now,
while writing this poem.

Maybe that’s enough.

Leaving Lost Angels

I am emptying at your move
I have no choice but love
I no longer fold my hands for anything
but rest
I have earned
every scar
and all I know of capes
could be squeezed,
uncomfortably into
a dire, match-book mattress,
I only give up when
it protects you.
Tonight I push the bill
off the bar and no longer
snort my way back to sick,
warm, real abandon.
I don’t live in the name of
Rimbaud, Kerouac or Morrison,
this little thing is mine,
and only mine.
The easiest part was killing it
in my head .
Otherwise,
the hardest part is being
aware you are MISSING
irreplaceable days,
and in finding your earnest hope,
for a chance
to live out
what many might call
average lives,
you get to partake of
each individual
dynastic star from
the purview of
cell, stone, and bars.

Thirty-Three

Thirty-Three

He got up early,
it was his birthday,
so he wanted an hour to write.
He could no longer rely
on bottles and rolled goods,
so he thought

“I can have whatever else I want”
and all that meant was an hour.

All week there had been enough to do
and all weekend would continue.

He had started to replace all the music
on his player with old stuff he
had not listened to in a long time.
Even Green Day “Dookie” &
Weezer’s Blue Album.

It reminded him of the time before
the drink and the blaze,
when comic books like
“The Savage Dragon” or
“The Maxx” were his best friends,
when he had a copy of “Creepshow” in
graphic novel format,
and just like the kid in the paratext story,
he cursed anyone that got in-between.

After that he had gotten into “The Hobbit”,
and R.L. Stine, until finally,
in grade 5, he met his first fave writer.

(The same year he fainted
during a video the Roman Catholics showed them
of a baby being born, despite his love of horror movies,
and the sight of nothing else had
ever made him so queasy as all that blood,
from some random Catholic woman who
presumably had offered up her home video birth
to frighten the shot out of the kids
at St. Peter’s Elementary.)

That year he stayed up all night with Cujo
and knew he wanted to write like the King.

He was happy again now,
the way he was back then.

It was going to be
one fuck of a year.

You can trace the magic
in every day
track it bloodhound down,
like streets without names,
pics without frames
players without games.

Or you can get hung up on
what you don’t get to do.

He looked at his watch,
and saw he still had 45 minutes.

He looked at his son’s photo,
the bright of his eyes,
and he thought of how amazing it was
that the kid loved Green Day and
was devouring King now also,
and how,
in no short time,
he too would be 33.

And for the first time since he dried out,
it was more than enough
to keep going.