Art by Cindy Press ♥ Poetry by Michel Fuseau

I am a cocksmith
Dormant
A wordman
Extinct
Rubbing the sleep out of my eye
Rubbing out the vision
Drag it and drop it
Choke it down
Munch on blue pills without water
It’s fair to say
Life is rationed out
One drop at a time
Three times daily
t.i.d.elight
White-robed pharmacists
are my best friends
An exaltation of narcs
with a genius for the perverse
they know how to handle me
as I know how to handle them
El gringo drogado
He who has over-the-counter hard-ons
For all those bottles and boxes
Labels rolling their R’s
Behind them
I want 30 at a time
Codeine
Ambien
Any elevator going down
Gimme gimme gimme
Stuff it down
Like the food I’m supposed to eat
30 at a time
In bright equatorial daylight no less
On benches
In buses
With witnesses
Popping the blister packs
Like seed pods, holding tiny white
Restorations to my vitals
Trying not to drop a single pastilla
But the vitality is gone
The energy is chemically induced
I am a human oven
Stuffing everything inside
Chasing it down with firmly packed pills
A million billion pillion trillion
Megagrams of
Loneliness
Grief
The ability to love
And be loved
Is not measured in dosage
Let the liver deal with it
Let the pancreas melt
Let the kidneys donate themselves
To someone needier than me
Cram my need into that oven
Don’t mention it
Hide in hovels
Among the dust and crowing cocks
I’m a one-eyed man watching
Three-legged stray dogs
Rolling downhill in a fighting ball of mange
Gathering fifty cents just to see my kid
Three buses
Fifty Indians
Four panic attacks
And I’m too sick to
Jump on trampolines with her
It sucks to be afraid of heights
And live in a city at 8000 feet
Can’t
Won’t
Don’t
Quit in Quit-o
Learn to hate it
Like my father hated it
Beaten and orphaned
Fleeing his birthplace
It backfired for me:
Every few years
I tried to leave the States
And always wound up coming back

Now I’m stuck here
Hooked
Sinkered
Sunk
A fugitive with minor charges
Harmless to all save myself
But saving myself is like swimming
To a distant shore
When you’ve forgotten how to row
And the boat’s already on the bottom
And you’ve swallowed all the life savers
A failure to appear,
I have learned to survive everything
But not live, not life, not living
Not on this thin Third World mattress
Not in this Spanish colonial flat
Not a bathroom down the hall
With a black light bulb
Purple when you shitCramped in near darkness
Dropping a black pickle
A black joke
Not with a cold shower downstairs
In the courtyard
Not my ass in full view of the
Silent wordless Incas
That are my neighbors
Not showing my ass
Not shivering once a week
Because,
As I learned,
Surviving
But not live
Not life
Not living
I’ve cut down on my bathing
My socks are ancient relics
Weapons of mass revulsion
If you’ve walked an entire day
Without giving or receiving
An entire word
You have plunged into the volcano
Of void
Ecuadorian emptiness
Expatriation
Expiation
Expiration
Expulsion
Exit

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