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77 Words About Nothing (Triad)


by Anthony Van Hart


77 Words About Nothing

2.21.2012 [1]

I always thought we belonged in some gutter -

Together.

Trading punches and clinking bottles.

Shooters, mostly.

Tiny vessels of strawberry wine. Or maybe something peach flavored.

Something breezy to kill the sting of the harder stuff.

Remember that time the bus driver didn't let me on?

Said the Greyhound was no place for drunkards.

That was Memphis.

She hated my face, my stale smile.

She said it made her miserable.

More miserable than the smell of the river.

 

77 Words About Nothing

2.21.2012 [2]

We met up with Slow Slim while he was taking the trash down to the curb.

His hair was messed and blood was gushing from the web between his thumb and index finger.

He paused a little to look at us while globs pattered and melted the fresh snow behind his bare feet.

We never talked to Slim.

We'd just walk by to catch glimpses and see if he'd smile.

Give us a toothless grin -

Or maybe wink.

 

 

 

77 Words About Nothing

2.20.2012

When you've spent as much time as I have cleaning up spilled coffee and steak sauce, it's the little things that you really begin to appreciate.

Stuffing shells, smelling empty bourbon bottles, buying books,

and burying your blues.

It's the easy things like these that begin to define your time when you don't know what else to do with it.

Filling notebooks with jibberish because empty pages are depressing;

and people seem to like jibberish.

Don't they?

 


-to be published by Untoward

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