Espresso shots

then gun shots, outside my window

I think this once safe neighborhood

is beginning to get interesting.

I pick a quiet place to type

and then the police come.

I have heard countless black people screaming, “White Flight! White Flight!”

But I’m not going anywhere.

I am too interested in violence, race relations, radicals, and people of all colors

who hate.

I see beauty, in a murderous German Shepherd

and when the chips are down

and the bombs drop—

we will see who people really are

the moralizers will be murderers

quiet thinkers, will get out of town

I will be in town, still

because I have a death wish

It’s the Hemingway phenomenon:

do what might kill you, and you can grab genius by the balls

it comes, when you don’t try

like looking at a woman, in a flower dress, on Sunday.

It’s totally different

when your eyes are prepared for lust—

it takes more than flesh

to penetrate

the myopic gaze of a pervert.

Unsuspecting beauty, draped in purity

is more of a turn-on

than the woman who practically shows you, her junk

and that’s what it is

there’s nothing there

but hook-ups

that do far worse to a man, than if he put his dick in an electrical outlet.

The man who does—

does it again, and again

and the woman, doesn’t power him.

She drains him of all his self-respect.

The espresso tastes good right now

as I think of my interest in strange people

They all require a personal philosophy

that’s different from the propaganda

most of us believe.

Like,

the killer who has to go about his day

knowing, the police will kick-in his door, someday.

Men have turned themselves in

for lesser crimes

because they couldn’t take

the anxiety.

What gives a guy his balls,

to do what he wants?

There is a man who could write the next great American novel

but he chooses to lay down the line,

honestly.

He doesn’t experience great things to put into a great novel

so he writes about the stink

coming from his soul.

I’m not going to run from who I am

even when it hurts.

I’m going to stand

my ground

until the flood waters come

under a sea of disappointment

where the crabs, pluck-off my toes

one by one

and the oysters make pearls from my pain.

Nobody can hear the sound of my suffering

as the fish nibble away

at my tender white corpse

where the sea weed sucks me down

and the clown fish laugh.