Six Poems
by Alan Catlin
American Werewolf in London
They were lovers on an
installment plan, women with
limited warranties, no money back
guarantees. They were uptown
girls slumming as way-downtown
women, Chelsea girls available
for horny men jonesing for sex.
These men for whom no expense
were spared to satisfy their lusts,
“Put it on the card. Write it off
as a business expense. As mental
health insurance... Whatever.”
Were men so desperate for human
contact of the feminine kind,
they’d sell their first born, for half
the going rate for a bedroom
super star so loaded on ‘ludes
they might just as well been tailor’s
dummies with a pulse. After close
encounters of an impersonal kind,
the men would be so depressed,
they’d leave their room in search
of a couple of Bloodies in an all
night bar. Someone knew a place
that made them with real blood.
Someone always did.
The Big Sleep
Sirens splitting headache into
dream fragments. All part of some
urban war hell, door to door death
like Beirut in the 80’s, like bombed
into oblivion Syrian cities, the Iraq oil
fields made for burning...
Ash clogged rain on cracked window
panes suggests it is only this badass
town burning down from the edges in,
to a soundtrack from some early black
and white Lynch movie where waking
is what dreams used to be once everyone
had fallen over the edge into nightmare...
Needles of light poke holes in the center
of unfocused eyes, blood stains never
painted walls, ceilings sag where broken
pipes leaked in that time before sleep
was invented. Women were portraits, then,
sketched by an artist gone mad, severed
ears hanging by loose filaments of skin;
even the white paint had impurities in it.
No one questioned what anyone had
to say then. Even the fires were less
frequent and the ash that fell was pleasing,
soothing, almost like snow on newly
mounded earth.
Chinatown
“Inside a single-use life, there are no second chances.”
Ocean Vuong
Year of the dragon gangsters, stiletto tough
and Brylcreme slick
China white nights and mary jane afternoons:
golden armed and raspy voiced street
creepers
Sweat shop laundries and steam heated, dry
pressed, elite shop labels
Snub nose gats and Bunker Hill blasters:
strong arm demands and protection
racket scams
Underage flesh merchants, white and yellow
slave merchants: a pound of flesh equals
a bowl of O
Shanghai sailors, pocket watch lifters, stab and
go murder men
Pushcart vendors: “don’t ask what’s in it” edibles,
charred dead meat on a stick, buy-it-cheap
prices
Stolen goods store fronts, you-name-it we’ve got-it
more-coming soon-sales: Permits! We don’t
need no stinkin’ permits!
Crime family Law and Order strictly enforced:
step out of line and you pay the ultimate
price
Mickey Finn House Specialty Cocktails, Bay City
back alley rollers; strange street music and tin
pan alley concerts
After the ice cream specials: slumming it debs:
Don’t feed the locals, Don’t mingle with
their trash attitudes, rarely ends well
New Year’s Celebrations: Years of the Rat, Dog, Hare.....
fireworks, gunshots, the whole nine yards;
the wilder the costume the more the mayhem
Raw sewage in streets of broken dreams, perfume
valleys and sordid hideaways
White woman in front seat, top down convertible, dead
shot in broad daylight, just another unsolved
homicide, just another victimless crime
Chinatown
Never Let Me Go
“I must be dead for there is nothing but blue
snow and the furious silence of a gunshot.
Two birds crash blindly against the glass
surface of a lake. I’m cold, religiously cold.”
Will Christopher Baer, Kiss Me, Judas
Shown the way to the last whiskey bar
Date rape drug introduced into House
Special Ice Nine Cocktail
Waking up in a new dimension of hung over
Naked
Packed in ice
One kidney short of a pair.
“DON’T WORRY,” a voice whispers,
“YOU REALLY ONLY NEED ONE.”
Stockpiled transplant coolers
White exterior with a red cross on all four sides
Years of scalpel work tutored by the best
Dismissed for dereliction of duty
For consuming too many forbidden beverages
while on call
then showing up for emergency work
One slip and your done
There are no second chances during surgery
Still the fastest man on the block
with a knife when relatively sober
Neat and clean
Precise
Now a cutter on the underground circuit
Off the books
Cash in hand
Best job he ever had
Doesn’t dare think about fucking up
The guys who pay give dying the slow death
new meaning
Torment and torture what they do best
Some day he might retire
If he lives long enough
Windy Night
Outside the yellow cab is honking, engine running, portable radio tuned into Classic Oldies medleys
Freddy and the Dreamers on Furman Street
'I'm Telling You Now' far past midnight, streetlights shot out again-all the better not to see you in-
And the cabbie is waiting for the girl in the house across the way with no power, not three minutes inside, dropped off by another cab
Same company different driver his tail lights barely vanished
Him barely settled into the primo spot in Dunkin' Donuts parking lot where he counts his cash, arranging the bills, hearing the call for Furman, same address, same empty house, so what? she tips big time,
No questions asked this time of night
A fare is a fare
A tip is a tip
Especially a big one
Though if he had to testify---
Well that's another story for another time and place
And she's on her cell, talking as she locks up, hustles to the new cab, backpack she didn't have when she went in slung over one shoulder
As she slams the door, giving an address across town, in The Projects
No Man's Land
For pizza delivery guys, sub shops, Chinese take out
No man's land ever since the last guy got wasted at a bogus ghost town vacant apartment address
Four juvenile offenders with baseball bats
Not Louisville Sluggers, aluminum bats,
"Motherfucker dented my bat" One kid said
Another said, "We didn't mean to waste no dude. Just wanted to like mess him up a bit like."
Like
Like what
Like for fun:
Two broken kneecaps, ten fractured ribs, shattered jaw, compound this and that, caved in skull, disarticulations
Dead father of three children with a widow at home waiting for a police report
That would read, "Man slaughtered in the first degree."
For what?
Twenty-three dollars, two orders of egg rolls, four cans of Diet Pepsi, a combo dinner, Shrimp and Snow Peas, General Tso's Chicken-----
They drank the sodas
Got high
But they didn't touch the food.
92 degrees and naked
We can hear them
on their porch
listening to their ultra-bass modulated, amplified exaggerated repetitious noise rap they think makes them mean and ugly
smoking the joints they brazenly rolled all day out there when the light was better
And all their friends were into stopping by
on their kid's bikes
on foot
in their window rattling sound surround stereo systems on wheels
with their cash for the flash
goods exchanged for well-folded large denomination dinero
a means of transaction they'd perfected in a lifetime of making deals and practicing slick moves
along with all their bullshit jive talking
bad acting in one group home after another
from juvey to adult lockdown without missing a beat
Why it seems just the other day they were like four years old and scoring daddies roll your own, smoke your own goods
running nickel bags and copping lids as soon as they were old enough to walk
the thinking being no Po leece officer yet popped a kid in diapers for possession
yet
the kind of thinking that earned you hard time
on a Federal rap for possession of pounds, kilos, dude, not ounces of ice,
weapons too and nearly a half a mil in cash
the whole nine yards
It was a rap so solid no amount of well spent dough spread around the beat was going to make it go away like most of the other ones had
And one by one the kids were getting popped too
Going down for felonies multitudinous and various
We can only hope they'll all be gone by the end of summer
and we can open the windows
and not hear that shit they got going on over there
listen to our Horowitz, our Watts our Gould
The Masters
BIO: Alan Catlin has published numerous full length books and chapbooks including a long series of movie inspired chapbooks uner the working title Hollyweird. All of them have been published including Blue Velvet which wn the Slipstream Chapbbok Award. Recent publications including a book of shrot stoires, The Naked City (Anxoety Press) a fictional memoir Chaos Management (Alien Buddha and Work Anxiety POems (Roadhouse Press)