Breakfast of a Lush
We arrived, strong of back and weak-willed,
took our places and prayed for death.
I looked around and thought, Me
and my hobo socks are going north,
take the revolver along.
But there was smoking to be done,
though the harvest had been poor,
and once you know there’s that much sky
it’s hard to get away from it.
Evening was always a maudlin affair,
polite as a heatless match and just as colorful,
a time to caress old grievances,
craft fine and useless scandals,
gaze at the dishes, risk sitting down.
My job was to make sleep difficult.
No one ever mentioned if it worked.
But every time it bothered coming
we’d ravish the flimsy dawn.
Cocaine Breakfast
Your mouth of hair,
your eye of dandelion stems,
your brain of gleaming whirlygig shit—
I don’t love anything near you.
I want to break my heart with a violin,
but this isn’t music, and you know it.
What tempers you?
Does your hand, any hand, remind you of anything?
I’d call it catalepsy, but it’s just your stare,
so lay off the halleluiahs.
It’s like replacing a lost tooth with one that won’t stop growing,
so you learn to gnaw.
Right now I doubt you’ve ever seen morning.
Your tongue’s a crumpled wire.
Your gums are pristine ash.
You giggle very well
and have a daunting vocabulary.
You have no smell.
I know you have pockets,
full of the usual keepsakes,
but I’m in no mood for that ritual right now.
If you need it, the window opens,
there’s plenty of air if you think you want it,
we’re five flights up and it’s easy to get down.
-
G. L. Ford lives and works in Victoria, Texas. He is the author of Sans, a book of poems (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2017). He helped edit the "6x6" poetry periodical from 2000 to 2017, and formerly wrote a column for the free paper New York Nights.