bohemian warfare


let me tell you of the time
i wrote about an old man
who came into my
house at night
with a pack of
cigarettes and
a bottle that belonged
to somebody named jack
he stank
like a pig farm on a hot day
looked
like he’d rolled around in the mud
maybe even
enjoyed it too much
for his own good
but the point is
he was just another
fucking fool who thought
that life was a bottle
he could just drink out of
and not worry that
his liver was taking a
beating
going full blast
all thru the night
like a twenty-four hour convenience store
or a hooker
who was broke and had to feed her
twenty-four kids
but the point is
i didn’t like him very much
and neither should you
because that’s the way it is
we’re of a better
breed we pay no mind
to lower lifeforms such as this
who walk into our houses
uninvited
with their fat jeans and their denim guts
and their bottles of
jack-something-or-other
i hated how his gigantic ass
took up the entire couch leaving me
no room to even have
a little peace of mind
god-damnit i wanted to scream
who are you and what makes
you think that you belong here
but i knew he’d bargain
some kind of guilt-trip diplomacy
“hell son, i fought for you over
in germany, korea, ‘nam...
you owe me with yer life”
but life
really is a war in itself
if you think about it
though at the time i wasn’t quite
used to it yet,
instead my war was
watching his lonely ass drag in
and flatten the cushions
on my brand-new couch
spilling that fucking
alcohol everywhere and watching
some anonymous porn flick
on pay-per-view that i’d
never paid for,
they scrambled it like eggs
but it was all plain and pretty
to him anyway,
that drunken son-of-a-bitch
wasting away
i could smell the odor
(paint thinner? nail polish?)
creeping into my skin
it was that noxious
but the worst part was when
he didn’t put his bottle away
after the first few swigs
“damn wife left me again”
and the whole bottle went down
all at once, not a drop to spare
not even for me
- though i don’t drink but it wouldn’t have hurt
at the time you know -
and when he looked at me with those
empty, jaded
half-closed eyes which suddenly got wide
there was nothing i could do
but watch in horror
as he began to vomit
repeatedly
all over the chairs,
covering the walls
splashing on the TV
blanketing the curtains, the armchair covers
finding its way down to the carpet
and the mere sight of the
thick, olive green, viscous broth
made me retch inside,
made me put my hand up to my mouth
and run to my room
where i picked up this pen
full of ink and sweat
and tears and
blood
implicative of the war within
and i started to
vomit
all over the paper
but somehow it turned into
something worse
and
whatever it is
i don’t like it
and it’s not very poetic
so i
think i’ll
just stop
before
it
sickens
you
too




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