white ice-cream on your bottom lip (and a lavender sprinkle in the corner of your mouth)

 these females drivin me crazy
    with too many problems
  the men on the floor turned into
       shadows
      while the women held court on the hallway
       floor, pillows and all
  swapping stories about how to 
   fend off thieves in the night, at the shelters;
      with a bar of soap in your pillow-case.

 last night i gave nadine the most beautiful pillow-case
   with embossed white stripes
  i thought she'd like it.
   something beautiful in that stinking place
    the sharpness of the disinfectant only masking
        the smell of shit..ever present.

she told me she cries every day
  about having hiv, which she got from a dirty tattoo needle
      her kids don't know, but her old man says
          give it to me because i wanna die with you mamma

   she runs around the unit with her tranny sister juliet
     and they share xanex and talk
       about their secrets in spanish.


 
    (names changed to protect the innocents)

 

april fool's day

beginning of the year

dear jimmy (jimbo)

i wonder if you remember her sometimes....

   the little one, big smiles, blue eyes like yours and flaxen hair.

    maybe you look at the little golden curled, angel faced german bred boys....

   perhaps that's when you see her.

 will you be, as rip van-winkle arriving in the door

   much older, grayer?

 perhaps this will be the time they'll get to know of their

   long lost sister. she loves them, like

   a sister who does not know her brothers-

            only imagining them.

       you must know it's time,

             time

  to dissolve that pit of anger you've held onto for so long.

 i imagine you have it hidden away, so far away where-

    you don't even know it's there.

   jimmy-

       sometimes she wants to become you when she looks at old photos.

        grinning, pock-faced, shaggy-sandy coloured hair all in your eyes.

 she wishes she knew you then.

 she wishes to go back in time-

 only to eradicate the source of your bitterness....

 and perhaps, still know you today.

  grinning and cracking jokes.

happy birthday robert

smells like junkies

   
 the same, somehow, for each of them

   strong scent of  sickly sweet shampoo mixed up with the smoke of 1 million
       cigarettes and the parade of one million lies  spilled from their lips

     remnants of pulled apart cigarette filters
        blood
          head lice and suicide

   pinpoint pupils in bright blue eyes and cadence of speech and voice
            so unmistakably, so violently disfigured

    and just the same
     a procession of them, gone
   
                for good


 

new light (s)