OK, I took huge liberties with nostaugustines’s July challenge verse. It started me off in a direction and I thought it would be fun to roll with it. Apologies in advance if too far out of the spirit of the exercise.
Here is the original:
Memory is a prison
A refrigerator buzz
While I make tostadas
A hum over mumbling
Mobsters on the box
A-wandering, mapless
A baroque Sicilian plot
Memory is a prison
Here is the mess I made out of it:
Memory is a prison
Of the smell of scorched beans
While I make tostadas,
A refrigerator buzz
From the broken fan.
Denver, Summer, hot, 1978.
The apartment a block from Colfax
With drug dealers on the porch
And garbage trucks in the alley
At 3AM. I contemplate
The rack of Winchester .30-30’s
With lever action
At Gart Brothers.
White Bear
Kicks in my door
His voice
A hum over mumbling,
Can’t understand him so drunk.
Tired of being just another Indian
Sleeping at the bus stop
Next to the emptys of Thunderbird.
He walked and hitched from South Dakota,
Wandering mapless, shiftless, meaningless
Near madness,
Not sure who he killed –
Girlfriend, wife, cousin.
Justice in his family
Baroque, a Sicilian plot
Of honor and
Retribution.
But none of that matters –
Memory is a prison
Because she saw someone else’s nightgown
On the back of the bedroom door,
A bottle of eyeliner
On the sink,
And was gone.
Left me with the junkies
And mobsters
Playing cards
On top of the milkbox,
Who grabbed her ass
On her way out
the door.
qbit 