Everybody asks for my ID
because I don’t have one.
I had a dream last night
where they wouldn’t let me drink because I didn’t have an ID.
I guess the people in my mind know better than me.
Even though I have a long beard
and alcohol can be smelled in the air when I sweat…
I’m not allowed in the kitchen
because once I yawned while standing too close to the stove
and a gust of my breath burned down the refrigerator…
Still, nobody will serve me.
If I get a friend, or better yet, a stranger,
to pick something up for me,
all the store clerks and all the bartenders know my regular drinks
and threaten to call the law if they try buying booze for me again.
But late at night, I stumble down the road,
down South Carolina way,
and one of my young nurses I had when I was in the sink tank,
her husband’s off working the graveyard shift.
And I drink his beer, his scotch, his brother Harmy’s moonshine,
while I massage my little nurse’s back,
the only place her healing hands can’t reach herself.
Sometimes he comes home early
and I have to make an abrupt getaway.
I can hear him yelling blocks away,
then I faintly hear her sweet voice carrying on the breeze:
“I don’t know! I don’t know! He ain’t got no ID!”
Posts: 326
Threads: 90
Joined: Apr 2013
I enjoyed reading this poem Rowens, it subtly oozes a wicked sense of humour throughout. And the last line is brilliant, thanks for the read.
 wae aye man ye radgie
I do what I can. I'm glad to spread joy when it spreads to me.
Posts: 134
Threads: 10
Joined: Mar 2013
I like nurses, and that flaming booze burp line in your poem. What's the term tragi-comic?
I've said before that my life is a tragi-comedy. But the people that I said it to are now dead.
I've since said that my life is but a situational series of unfortunate events. But I might have said that under the influence of wanting to fuck Emily Browning with my soul, and more than my soul. But really I was in love with Violet Baudelaire, as played by Emily Browning. After I left New York, right before she moved there. But I haven't yet gone back since then. Since she's not the Violet Baudelaire that I don't know and love, because she doesn't exist.
Emily Browning exists. But she did Sucker Punch. And it's hard to love someone that doesn't have any sense. Unless you're a woman, in love with a man.
This poem has nothing to do with this. But I hate everything I write, and change the subject as much as I can.
Posts: 497
Threads: 83
Joined: Dec 2012
It gets a bit tiresome to repeat myself, but i just read once more what I would term a typical rowem.
There are of course quite a bunch of other good poets around here , but I in particular like this slightly absurd humor. Call it the Marxbrotherization of narratives narrating already Marxbrotherised, virtually real life situations.
Reading you, I think Vonnegut and Philipp K Dick.
Do you mean the poem, or the distraction I wrote for the poem. I'm thinking about making a book of distractions from poems, and publishing them instead of the poems.
I mentioned another E.B., I have a love/hate relationship with those initials. And the ever elusive V. But even though Lemony Snicket doesn't exist either, I still get letters and postcards in return when I write to him. So that gave me hope. I forget how old V.B. is nowadays.
Last time I saw her, she was 16, and I was in the guise of my man inside, Billy Malone. And we were on the porch of another Bad Situation House, where I have a way of finding myself when I'm lost or on the run. These are some aspects of the Situational adventures that I go on. When I travel as Billy Malone, that's when people call me mad. I had to make a few books to explain all these things.
Posts: 426
Threads: 41
Joined: Feb 2013
rowens, what a witty poem. laughed out loud more than once, and its my bday, so thanks for that gift ;D
love the idea of the distraction book. maybe you could print the poems in mini print too though, so it gives it a context. but make it so small you'd need a magnifying glass, you know like the full version of the Oxford English Dictionary. make the readers work for it. ;p
_______________________________________
The howling beast is back.
When they catch up with me, I'm stuck in a hospital or a family member's house like now. These are the times when I explain.
The rational chamber, and the religious chamber of my mind; and the guiding, higher chamber, that the rational calls my "conscience" and the religious calls my "guardian angel".
That's why the hospitals can't keep me locked up. Because I'm so good at explaining.
I'm not so good at explaining to family, and so it takes me a whole lot longer to deal with them. I'm dealing with them now, by not talking to them.
But I think if I'm still here next year, I'll probably be a corpse. I'm drinking myself to death; and this computer seems to be an addictive property too.
I'd give you a better birthday present if I was with you. But you'd probably leave me unopened and take me back to the store to get my money back. But I'd still let you keep the money.
Posts: 136
Threads: 28
Joined: Dec 2012
First off, I love the title and the conversational low-down that you share with us. Takes guts...or something, whatever it is , you've got it. This is good, amusing and sad.
on a side note: Happy birthday, Cloudy. Sorry I am late, story of my life.
Heart
Posts: 426
Threads: 41
Joined: Feb 2013
thanks heart =]
rowens I don't make a habit of returning gifts. at worst I regift... but then it's still a gift since I was able to have the satisfaction of making someone else happy! everybody wins ;D ;p
_______________________________________
The howling beast is back.
Posts: 497
Threads: 83
Joined: Dec 2012
(05-09-2013, 11:02 PM)rowens Wrote: When they catch up with me, I'm stuck in a hospital or a family member's house like now. These are the times when I explain.
The rational chamber, and the religious chamber of my mind; and the guiding, higher chamber, that the rational calls my "conscience" and the religious calls my "guardian angel".
That's why the hospitals can't keep me locked up. Because I'm so good at explaining.
I'm not so good at explaining to family, and so it takes me a whole lot longer to deal with them. I'm dealing with them now, by not talking to them.
But I think if I'm still here next year, I'll probably be a corpse. I'm drinking myself to death; and this computer seems to be an addictive property too. <<< it makes me too sad to say anymore.
I'd give you a better birthday present if I was with you. But you'd probably leave me unopened and take me back to the store to get my money back. But I'd still let you keep the money.
I don't allow anyone to celebrate my birthday. But I celebrate girls' birthdays. I sometimes invent holidays and suitable holiday antics for girls' birthdays, and some dead men's of interest.
I take my magical adventures seriously. And they give me what I need to write. Doctors have said things like, "You may need to write. But no one else needs you to write."
And I've been struggling with my short stories and novels for a year or two now. Because the people that love me plead with me to lay low and be quiet. So again, men don't kill the things they love; the things you love kill you.
Drinking doesn't even work anymore.
Posts: 497
Threads: 83
Joined: Dec 2012
the people who love you tell you to slow down comes it to writing?
no comment.
When I need to write a book that takes place in California, I need to go to California. Money be damned. But people find me annoying and a waste of their time. So it's hard to stay under the radar, and trouble looms. And people like to make trouble with others; and so they do with me.
That's why in that book I could have used as an epigraph:
"America is not so much a nightmare as a nondream. The American nondream is precisely a move to wipe the dream out of existence. The dream is a spontaneous happening and therefore dangerous to a control system set up by the nondreamers....The way to kill a man or a nation is to cut off his dreams, the way the whites are taking care of the Indians: killing their dreams, their magic, their familiar spirits."
Though I use a shorter one.
|
