from STASHU IN A FAMILY WAY by Joseph Lisowski
LOVER MAN
The guy upstairs keeps playin'
Billie Holiday, her squeaky voice
comin' through the vents moanin' about
some ole devil an' god bless some child.
Keerap! Make up your mind why don'tcha!
Then that one 'bout being crazy. Yeah
"crazy he call me." You damn right.
It's drivin' me nuts. Shut the damn thing off!
He just moved in. I don't see him much
but I don't like him. I mean who would?
Him sittin' up there by hisself listenin'
to some dead junkie. Hell, if he's into needles
there's enough live ones right outside the buildin'.
No need to explain.
Goddammit, now he's got me doin' it!
WHAT TIME YOU GOT?
The past keeps comin' back
'cept you know it ain't real.
It ain't now, you know
but it kinda sticks in your stomach
like a piece of bad fish.
You try to get it out
all of it, once an' forever
but all you get is gas.
You still got the taste
an' it ain't nothin' but bad.
MAYBE IT'S HEARTBURN
I got these dreams that scare
the shit outa me all kinds
of crazy stuff I don't wanna talk about.
I don't know where they're comin' from.
I don't do nothin', don't go nowhere most days,
don't watch TV, don't read nothin' but the paper
an' even that ain't regular.
Sure, I talk to a neighbor or two sometimes.
I just don't get it.
There's just me an' them bastards
who wake me up ina middle of the night
who disappear but always come back.
-NEW-
Stashu Kapinski Strikes Out
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Stashu Kapinski, the guy who wrote these poems, is a sometime bum living in my skin. He doesn't get out much, but when you hear (and smell) him, you know he's noone else. He's pissed about a lot of things--being out of work for so long, the steel mills in Pittsburgh closing down, getting old, the price of beer, you name it. But he hasn't given up. There are still moments when he feels like the King of Polish Hill.
From 1986-1996, Joseph Lisowski was Professor of English at The University of the Virgin Islands; he is now teaching at Elizabeth City State University. His detective fiction novel, LOOKING FOR LISA, has just been published by Fiction Works |
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