dick long | five poems

Seasons

Part One- Fall

The hotel radiator
gurgled in the Fall
like my guts do
after a bender

An ever present chirp
echoes persistently
from the half dead
smoke alarms
forgotten in the corners
of this septic flop

I break one off the ceiling
and make an ashtray

“What a contrived attempt
at irony”, I thought

Part Two- Winter

I’ve been snowed in for three days
with no food

Poor people don’t plan
That’s WHY we’re poor

Lou’s car is now unstuck
he invites me to the grocery

“There’s a liquor store next door” he adds
I accept
Leaving the stench of my room
for the first time in days
like a stagnant shit
dropped in a white bowl

Everything is so bright and clean
I go back in for my sunglasses

Pinewood

I believe the roaches
have an axe to grind

karmatically speaking

ten thousand souls
I have put to death
eyelashes of infants aren’t safe
in the space where I roam
they eat them
Filth of undescibable proportions
squish under my workboots

The smell of a dead body
permiates a locked door
possibly a bathroom
if it’s still used as such
perhaps now, a space to wash
car parts instead of pussy
or a meth lab

breathing burnt grease
mixed with Gentrol IGR
I start to cough
trying to catch my breath
the burning only amplifies
more coughing ensues
I NOW feel nauseas

“How could it have come to this?”
the loss of all hope I suppose
becoming more animal
than human
The janitor/ maintenance man said,
and I quote
“He used that bat and tried to,
rearrange her skull pieces”
two days of spilt blood
the carpet is starting to scab

Shitty Bands

I let shitty bands tell me how to sound

in my defense
I was nineteen
they were thirty
and mildly famous
egos stroked by hundreds

I thought they knew SOMETHING

I listened
and endured
watched as they expanded
nationally
internationally
record deals
commercials
starry eyed locals
looked on them with pride

my adoration
now drunken humiliation

I’ve been duped
and none of this REALLY happend

Suffering

How old is suffering?

Did mine start with harsh words
mimicked from my father?
Having the love capacity
of an unwanted dog

Was/is it the headaches that
prompted me to slice open my third eye
wanting only to insert a .40 caliber
and blow my shitty existence
sky high

boozed fucking

trips to the bank
so sick I can’t remember my address
1185 Apt. 10?
Now my lights are shut off.
I’m too scared or nervous
to have them turned back on
too scared to talk to real people
people with jobs
with kids
families
pets
They’d know what I was up to
see through me
an invisible stomache
full on pills

18 years of crying
realizing my best friend
has been a television
shitting out demands
on the way I dress
lying hopeless on an ashtray floor
hoping that I’ll like cocaine

Piss runs from my cock
like iced tea
My youg body can’t heal
from all the liquor
The clinic analyzes my specimen
the color is platelets
I DON’T stop drinking
the CDC compiles info on me
from a misdiagnosis
on the girl I was fucking
Now I’m in the system
five years before my first arrest

Stabbed

I stabbed him one week after writing this…

You might
sit at a desk
or sell doughnuts
or derive enlightenment
and satisfaction
from volunteering
at your church

I collect money
for a drug dealer
named Splurge
off Bancroft St.
he’s VERY mellow
and at this time
I am NOT

I fired a 9mm pistol (borrowed)
through the blue door
of a Toyota Camry
“BRING ME THE SHIT!”
I yelled at the trembling house

even in the ghetto

I get a response

Dick Long

Raised in Toledo, Ohio, Dick Long represents a type of man that is unfamiliar to most. A self educated blue collar polymath. Spending the majority of his life surrounded by poverty and violence, the arts have been his only means of release. With only a High School education, menial jobs in factories, bars, and as an exterminator have been his only options. His writting deals, mostly, with the misfits and nefarious circumstances experienced by those unfortunate enough to have had to resort to crime for survival, the unclean parts of the Rust Belt, and the drunks and addicts, that would, otherwise, not be able to articulate the weight of this type of environment themselves.