Made In Hell

 

 

 

Made In Hell

 

 

Her face was one-way glass

blank-innocent as a child's mirror,

her baby-blues welling soft,

winking not revealing

the opposite who watched

from the other side. She made her play

in a liar's crimson night where rain

greased the sidewalk smearing neon light

on the moon-hidden passage she shaded in her wait,

cigarette drooping smoke like San Francisco fog

above her golden gate.

 

His eyes matched her lipstick, hard as bathtub gin,

clear and extinguished as only eyes can be

that have seen the life go dead too many times,

suckered by patriotic chords that march

the rotting feet of war with tunes

suitable to aim your bullets by.

All that was over now 

or always here to stay; a grin

is only smoke 

curling in the shadow 

of a tipped fedora's brim.

The kiss was never meant to be a trap,

but it snapped her leg and crippled him for life

neither able to ever run again, tangled in

booze and the dicey bed spread with ice-cold aces

and eights. And when the children came

they never could make the change;

just learned they had to

pretend to be

someone else.

June 2023

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

posted for I Wake Up Screaming

Desperate Noir at desperate poets

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Images: Still from Secret Beyond The Door, 1947 Public Domain 

Manipulated photo dated 3-7-1949 from personal collection ©joyannjones

 

Cameo

 

 

 

 

 

Cameo

 

 

He knew it was all over. He was down to bit parts and baked beans, and infinite hours at the crusted table nursing shots of Old Peculiar. He was tired of the smell of dead fire, of himself, of the screams as cops kicked random drunks even more senseless outside the back door.  But she'd said to meet her here, after the curtain came down like a sickness for the last time, so he stayed til midnight, hopeful as a hundred other nights, and then walked home, no longer waiting, no longer thinking, just a papier mache lump reformed in the basin of losing it all. 

Yet that Sunday, as the wind blew streamers of wet newspaper across the moon, in the patter of the rain over his dissolving steps he heard her laughing, shockingly close in the black rippling dark, posed like Love when she dismisses her bodyguards, and carelessly makes a throwaway cameo just to keep her hand in. He'd imagined Natasha for twenty years, her compound bow lips and blackbird eyes, and here she was, if he hurried, disappearing down the street while the winos gaped, trailing her spiny excuses like porcupines, to lead him to that submarine she kept, down in the River Styx.

 

 

March 2022

 

 

 

posted for

Shay's Word List #16

Donald Barthelme

Note: I've never read Barthelme, nor do I pretend to understand post-modernism, and I really don't know where this came from as I don't normally do prose. It's a mystery.

Images: Sunday, 1926 © Edward Hopper   Fair Use

Ballarina in a Death's Head, © Salvador Dali   Fair Use