A Romantic Life
First, an old acquaintance
shoots herself in the head,
the pistol a gift from her latest husband…
Married recently to a solid guy
with a good reputation,
another posts a Christmas card:
We were too close to be so pure.
I had to pull away,
and the card goes on,
Let’s get together over coffee and talk.
I miss you.
Phone number included…
A third you asked a dozen times for dates
just married to another
lets you know, I’m miserable already…
From a mutual acquaintance,
you hear another ex, recently remarried,
cries at a wedding, confessing to a friend
she still loves you…
At your factory job,
some little thing goes wrong,
a blurry blueprint,
a part slightly out of tolerance, and you curse,
throw a wrench across the room.
WANG! All the henpecked husbands you look
down upon, look up from Penthouse pets
with puzzled grins, scratching their contented asses.
Laughing It Up
Your friend, Lulu, gives head to men she doesn’t like.
She calls the tool “a bone of contention between
the sexes.” Her laugh reminds you of an ivory bell
high in the Himalayas. She works nights
as does her sister, Michelle. Michelle takes off
her clothes to music down at the Magic Carpet bar.
She claims all men are the same man. He wears the face
of a father who made her tremble when he roared.
“Don’t let love come between us,” she laughs,
her laugh a wind chime on a yuppie porch.
When they come home in the morning after a hard
day’s night, you sit on the stoop to enjoy the view.
“Hey, old man,” they laugh, “how’s it hanging?”
Soft southern accents, they wink and grin like apes,
but they’re human for sure and take pity on your age,
and when you are most starving in your loneliness,
they visit to cuddle you between their breasts,
a hot Welsh sausage between four, white bread buns. […]
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Married to Bukwoski
After weeks, months of sleep, you wake up,
and it’s Tuesday. Your depression lifts a moment,
and you know you’re not one of them,
not Keats or Dylan, not Byron nor Poe,
and, then, the old damn problem returns—
how to be who you are and no one else,
when all the ways of being are spoken for,
and all you have is a damned dictionary
with its limited variety of arrangements
(the quick brown fox, quick, the brown fox,
brown the fox, quick, fox the quick brown)
until all your words are gibberish,
and you accuse yourself of being
an e. e. cummings sound alike or something worse.
So you tells yourself, “I must be nothing but myself,”
as laughable as that admission is, but, still,
after all that palaver, all that doubting self,
you find you must admit it’s reading Bukowski
that wakes you up after your long sleeps
with his beery kisses and not a reference
to the Queen of the Nile’s obscure mole at the end
of her third rib, the right anterior quadrant (its being shaped
like a map of the North Pole so that Egypt
and the North Pole intersect on the queen’s body mole
in an elaborate reference to matricidal elements
in good Queen Victoria’s England as seen through
the eyes of Dr. Frankenstein’s Promethean nightmare). […]
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Some people find Mr. Thomas’s sarcastic poems to be an uncomfortable read, but he sends them out as representative of a persona long ago outlived and softened by counseling. He thinks such poetry deserves to be represented within the canon. He plans to put some of them together in a book called The Poet As You. His work has appeared in Anglo-Welsh Review, Willow Springs, Work Literary Magazine, Bellowing Ark, Crab Creek Review and Chiron to name a few. A short story appeared in the Winter Issue of Kestrel, a poem in July’s Open Minds Quarterly and another is forthcoming in June in Illuminations. He has also founded, co-founded and edited three literary magazines in his time.