Scrap Paper Review
Issue #57
June 25, 2010
A Doll’s life
Sad doll dresses up in her past,
Piling her hair high
Stretching her legs into
Thin Nylon,
Propping herself up on high heals.
She never knows
Who she is or what she wants
Only that she wants something,
No someone
And certainly
Not me.
Bad poet heart break
I hate sad drunks.
Maybe because I’m just like them when I fall out of love
We can’t suffer alone.
We always have to find some poor fool somewhere to share our pain.
And generally, when I’m not the one inflicting it on someone else, someone else is inflicting it on me.
I know the look so well that when I see guys like the one at the bar this time, I head for the men’s room or pretend I left my cigarettes in the car.
But since I know this guy, I can’t make my escape after he calls out and begs for me to have a drink with him.
The worst part is that this guy talks in clichés, some wanna-be deadbeat poet whose shtick is to invite some check to his pad where he can write a poem for her with one hand while pulling off her panties with the other.
But this time the chick he hit on pricked his bubble and he couldn’t stop with the panties and went all the way up to love – and she said, “No way.”
And he assaulted her with such a deluge of bad poetry, she begged for him to stop.
But he can’t stop, and since she won’t listen to him he comes here to mutter his worn out phrases over perpetual beers, yanking in suckers like me for private sessions when no woman in her right mind will come near him.
But pain is pain, even for a bad poet, and after a while, he buys me drinks and we both get drunk, and then his words don’t matter, because he can barely see them, and I’m too drunk to hear.
And strangely, out of this, we find consolation.
The Palace
Sometimes it’s worth the price
The glitter in the class and seductive gazes
The Palace in Passaic appropriately named
For the fortune paid for each drink
And tips paid to half naked girls
Who careless if you look or get turned on
This is pure capitalism
A smile picks out pockets,
You can’t afford to get drunk here
Except on excess hormones.
Churned up by the parade of bare limbs
And the savage rumble of dance music
Making men here dizzy with lust
As we drown in want
Throbbing from head to toe
The Palace clashes with mixed metaphors
A tacky flood of imagery
Overwhelming my senses
Balloons and streamers dripping
From a ceiling marred by pealing paint
That day light would paint as shabby
Strippers give it its cool
Moving with outrageous attitudes
We ache to defeat,
Yet as repetitious as robots
So we can’t quite believe
They are human.
Our lust paints in the details
Imagining their interest in us
Forking over each tip
For a touch of their finger tip
Perhaps more
Aching with greater lust
For one of them to flash
A smile
And mean it.
Life like a leaf
January 21, 1977
CEDAR GROVE – Her eyes are like two pools gone stagnant with lines of stone rimming them.
She is scarred by each spoiled romance, stones tossed into her, sending ripples of pain across her face.
When she isn’t stagnant, she’s so rocked by abuse, I can’t stand looking at her.
So I buy her a drink.
I ache to take a picture of her, hoping that a quick shutter might catch a glimpse of the real her – some still life image her continual motion won’t allow me to see.
Yet even when she seems stagnant, she isn’t, some disruption going on inside her and stirring between her stare, flicking at the surface like hungry fish snatching insects from above.
She never talks about the past, saying only that she’s shut the door on what happened yesterday – as if it never happened.
She says she doesn’t believe in memories, and claims she’s always lived her life like a dried leaves, letting whatever wind that comes next whisk her away.
As hard as she seems, she really is as fragile as a leaf, shuddering at each impact life send, leaving pieces of herself behind even when she thinks she has moved on – her eyes showing shadows of it all under the pond scum.
I ache to stir up the water, to dip myself inside, but know better.
Other men had drowned in those pools, swallowed up in the immense depths of their vacancy, which leave ripples but no members, leaving pain but no memories, and I have no intention of becoming one more tossed stone in a long line of endless ripples.
I just buy her another drink instead.
Observations: 1978
The air breathes cigarettes
As you sit alone at the bar,
The mistaken victim
Of wire-haired lady killers
Dressed in harp notes
And suggestive smiles
His kind always play
Duel tunes
Keeping conquests in each corner
In case one won’t make out
Men of tin
(Written in 1987)
She says she likes her men made of tin so she can see her finger prints when she’s done with them, like crumpled soda cans no one else can use.
Bartenders call her “the girl on the hill,” because she picked up pudgy men, squeezing them like tubes of tooth paste for her fix of cocaine.
“Sometimes she doesn’t even have to fuck them,” one tavern owner on Wall Street tells me. “They’re so pleased to have a pretty girl pay attention to them, they just fork over whatever they have.”
She is always singing “Over the Rainbow,” as she plays us against each other at the bar, the brainless scarecrows, the cowardly lions, and the tin men she intends to squeeze the hearts out of.
She makes men violate the most basic rule when it comes to go go stripers: we all always fall in love with her.
“I can’t help pitying them,” she says after the second drink I buy her as if she truly believes she is helping them by using them, bringing them up to her room full of unicorns and pictures of John Wayne – each photo depicting the man she really loves in some phony movie pose.
One bartender calls her “the wicked bitch from Harrison Avenue,” especially on those nights when it is clear she is out to crush someone.
By the fifth drink, she’s even willing to take me hoe with her, thinking I might be good for “a snort and a fuck,” before she asks me to leave, she clicking her heals again and again on the dance floor taking almost no notice of this pack of tin men aching to have her.
And me, I keep feeling her drinks, hoping maybe she might make mistake me for someone else, someone with a heart, a brain and courage, when I know all I want is the fuck.
At the Red Baron
April 23, 1978
They could all die tomorrow
Cast iron bar fly faces
Painted with expressions of joy
Spilling blood for sex
As lonely men lay hooks into them
Pretending to be stars
Rat-trap box office tickets
Giving drinks with each admission
The fuck is up to luck
It is a tight rope walk
Over a netless music canyon
Back seat Cadillac Rock & Roll
With drunk dream beater
And cold fingers
Girls hop the floor boards
Thumping to old Stones tunes
Each not gift wrapped
In booze and expectations
Wraiths robed in a questionable
Social fabric
Their Polaroid portraits
Posted behind the bar
For anyone to acquire.