days of a g**

god knows you could get used to this--the new heft of some .38 heat stuck down your jeans. hell, it couldve belonged to someone’s dead grandfather
and maybe you traded a drunk a bottle of hootch for its cold oiled barrel digging into your skin.

upon contact with the revolver's worn wooden handle, your body goes electric with a great reckoning of scale: life and death shrink and grow like the plain shadow of your hand on the wood planks out back.
you imagine that the birds have stopped singing.
even the light thru the window bends away a little from this heavy thing resting with a dead weight on your thigh.

but you remind yourself that you would never actually…as you pull a long shirt down. in the mirror there is your split lip pulling into a grimace, and this slow building probability of lightning clouds in your eyes.

your woman

is waiting for you with shimmering eyelids and soft plentiful body under rough cotton sheets

back home.
so why you always finding yourself here with these skinny white girls instead? they look about to disappear like thin threads of opium suspended in a dark room just before someone opens the door.
and maybe thats it--you was just dizzy with the smoke,
unable to speak once wrappd in the bony arms of these well-shod ghosts with mist shrouding their delicate painted feet.

we both know that in the end you will wind up hand- full and empty-eyed
as pale milk starts to spill in the gutter.