Categories
Jazz Music poetry Short Stories Uncategorized Urban Legends

zippo slight of hand

she stops fingering pearl buttons

to hurl the speaker
into the face of her dressing mirror

when robert plant’s voice
bleeds onto her black dress

that he’s going to california
with an aching
in his heart

“You don’t know fuck!”
she screams as

glass shatters perpetually
into crime scene fragments
upon last year’s unswept floors

the moment seeing fit
to make her an undertaker again

she buried
the king and queen of cool
alive

in the same casket
beneath white metal desert windmills
rosary beads
wrapping their clasped hands

bodies still adorned with

his fedora
and
her spiked heels

swearing never to visit the grave
pretending it was never real

because he was already still
on the bottom
of someone else’s
just beneath the hollywood sign pool

belly full of xanax
liver pickled with vodka
tongue swollen with loathing
gun chambered heart choked with lies
record collection pawned
pockets full of weighty justifications

refusing to watch him die

“Yeah, how’s that working out for you, baby?’

the devil asks
doorway leaning
as he lights a cigarette
his
zippo slight of hand
blurring her sight

“Reliving it night after night…”

Categories
Jazz Music poetry Short Stories Uncategorized Urban Legends

saturday night in the mint julep

a rainy derby day
gives way
to an electric louisville evening
in the kingdom of kentucky

it’s gentlemen and princes called to court

the infield now muddy and trampled
by all the pretty horses

rose petals, dreams, and shattered illusions
of a southern sort

the race now over
the orb risen

she dances center stage for them
spot lit sparkling
hat pulled over her left eye
a fedora given to her by the devil himself

the sway of her hips
deciding the drummer’s beat
and the fascination of the crowd

when her number is over
she is approached by the coat check girl

the carrier pigeon sent
with a message in her padded palm
by the back corner booth occupant
of the barely green lamp lit
mahogany bar

she opens the black napkin
reading the words written in his
silver glowing spectral ink

“If I come any closer,
I will fall in love with you, my darling,
and believe me, you do not want that.
So here I will remain,
watching you through my curtain of smoke
each night
as this is the gentlest devotion
I have to offer…”

she swears for a moment
she felt a hand raise the back of her red dress

turning her eyes
to the void
she blows a kiss
then bows to the dead sea of seated sinners

filling the darkness and tables

saturday night
in the mint julep

Categories
Jazz Music poetry Short Stories Uncategorized Urban Legends

dante’s

we meet up every few hundred years
at the same special little place

our private table always waiting

black leather booth lined walls
covered in pictures of us
with frank sinatra
caesar romero
and every grinning kennedy

the bartender no longer asks what bourbon to pour into our manhattans

mutually assured destruction
the only dish on the menu

this year i bought new heels just for the occasion

a sumerian demon draws seams down my thighs

so i tell him wear your red suit, baby

it will match perfectly

with the armageddon in your eyes