Smoke Dancer

She moves like glass
And we both know

We need to stop

But we love the way it makes the night taste

Pearl of fumes
The smoke moves inside the pipe
It swirls like the tendrils of some deep-sea creature

Smoke dancing
Like a dozen drunk ballerinas
Wearing ice

There is something
In the way
she breathes
That makes me
Choke…

My name is Christopher Flakus, I am a poet and writer from Houston, Texas. From the get-go I wanted only two things out of this life…to be a poet, and to be an outlaw. I achieved both, though the state of Texas, and most folks really probably only see me as the latter. I write the songs of county jails, of rehabs, of psych wards, of addicts, of wanderers, and of the broken-hearted. I am certainly not the first to write about this life, certainly not the first to have lived it either. I do believe that the outlaw poetry tradition is somewhat being lost…the beatnik jailbird voices of yesterday are being replaced by a cleaner, sterilized, and safe-sounding prose…which is fine, folks will read what they like and that’s just fine. But I continue to write the world I live in, as long as I am living it. I attached a few poems of mine from a short book of poetry I wrote entitled: “Bare Down Into Hell With Me As Only a True Friend Would…” These poems chart my life from heroin addict in 2012, through jail, madness, and into my current state of shaky recovery…

I studied literature at St. Edwards University in Austin, Texas and St. Thomas University in Houston. I have published work in Blackheart Magazine, Glass: A Journal of The Arts, L’Allure De Monts, The Refined Savage Review, and was the co-editor of the punk poetry zine Cracked Mirror Repair. I am a contributor and co-author of several music articles for The Huffington Post.