ONE BARSTOOL AWAY By Jay Passer

 

old fat white American male poets

with baggy faded blue jeans

untucked button-down dress shirts

with ballpoint pens in breast pockets

trimmed white Santa-beards

plastic owlish glasses

like-new Panama hats

and too many Pushcart Prize nominations

make me want to

shriek

vomit

and murder things that are innocent.

old fat white American female poets

hair braided with hand-tooled leather clasps

necks liberally scented with patchouli

sporting loose paisley polyester print dresses

Birkenstocks or Doc Martens

and anything fucking else vintage

with Adderal smiles and splotchy skin

make me want to

run away

screaming

for my Mommy who died of cancer

15 years ago.

so, I hardly ever leave my place.

that way, I won't disgust myself

passing my own reflection

in some store window

sure to be smashed in the looting to come.

buy me a drink?

Jay Passer's work has appeared in print and online since 1988. Author of 13 poetry and prose collections, he is widely published digitally, most recently in Don't Submit!, Horror Sleaze Trash, Lothlorien Poetry Journal, Fixator Press, and Piker Press. He's been employed as a dishwasher, barista, cook, warehouseman, courier, house painter, pet sitter and mortuary apprentice. Passer lives and works in San Francisco, the city of his birth.