Author Joseph Heywood
About Joe
Woods Cop Mysteries
Other Novels
Non Fiction
Poetry
Photography
Paintings
Events
Contact
Links
Forum
JoeRoads.com
My Blog

Subscribe to the RSS Feed

DNR Terms

Yooper Bits

Trout Recipes

Brook Trout Flies

Travels

Seriously

Takeout Fiction

MSU Lacrosse

Misc Fly Drawings

Cartoons

Humor
 


Gehenna
[Toronto. April 24, 1994]

In the city
The prime time for trout,
No choice,
I walk the quick-step,
Eyes ahead,
Walking point,
Squinting like a polar walker,
The air in Gehenna still,
Zephyrless as an oven,
Sweat glues my shirt
To my back.
When I stop to catch
My breath and smoke
I sense movement
In the shadows.
“I’m cookin',” she says low-like,
“Kin you hep a lost lady?”
She has the graceful finger
Movements of a Thai
Temple dancer, this skew
Called Rose-a-Mort,
Brown-eyed, noisome
Practitioner of the pinchbeck,
She vamp-scans passers-by,
An actuary of action,
Lifting a filthy pink skirt
To reveal
A littoral of thin legs,
Emaciated hip-bones
Pressed over diaphanous skin,
She squalls like
The sulfur-crested cuckoo
At sunset
Keening for a handout
To buy a fix, no illusions,
No hunger here
But for oblivion
In the molten-melt
Push-a-gush
Into a strapped down,
Tapped up
Blue vein hard as aged hemp,
Not the high anymore,
But panacea
Like aspirin,
General anesthetic
Against living.
So low,” she crows, beat flat,
a victim of chances taken
and not, she shifts
rinforzando,
“ante-up my wikiup,
my little whiteworm,
the buzz-kill
hangs over me,
I need to scromp
Or knuckle-up to nasty,
Go hatless with
A broke-to-the-curb maggot,’
Dance the phantsula
In Flashabou butt-floss.
How you think I get this way, Mister,
And you like that?
Don’t seem like God’s plan
Where the Lord Jesus done gone,
The one I be knowin’ in my
Childhood where Bah-piss
Drinked the Drano, spoked in tongues?
Maybe the devil, that old
Beelzebub got hisseff inside me,
I hear he lives round my hood,
Preys on wimmins down on the luck.


 
 
Home   |   About   |   Blog   |   Tour   |   Links   |   Contact   |   Events   |   Forum

Copyright © 2008 Joseph Heywood. Design by C Marschke.