This piece is taken from Brook Yung’s The Spirits Undying Chase (one of the dopest, strikingly honest poets i’ve heard/read recently)
Because of the Hustler
And when all is dissipated When every moral is smoked away When the drug pools the body When the flesh decays and hangs from the bones like lazy lobs of pizza dough Everything becomes the forgotten The pain claps bright in the dark limerick of midnight light But tonight the goons will sleep nothing away
They move like zombies, coiling their skinny joint crazy fingers towards the white rock scraping shadows from the corners smoking their buzzing eyes into a knotty chandelier of head swash
Myth has it the first time they drained the drug by the nose and let the coke monkey sit its fang into the spume of their brains they saw a green hive of leaves swirling into a bowl of syrup and dust
Saw opium fields and Coke-Cola logos, a singing Sigmund Freud love letter His cursive sliding through a filmy smoke wall of an ether dream A narcotic tongue licking the clit of a junkie flame In the underground circus of the human mind fuck
This drug was my father’s love The boxed jewel who dragged his nose in an alley And face fucked his dreams smoke red Slow exhale, faint tapping of angel wing slapping, slow burn of tongue pinching and slicing in the head lucent arch of blue mind spoiling in the cat shadows of night each former aspiration so discolored, so dry and grey
Soon after the debris from her breast grew hands And pushed my mother and I away from him His face rubik’s-cubed The warp of his reflection stabbed and strangled him through the mirror.
Reality sunk and soon he finally told the bitch to get lost
Hey Shadow-whore, ‘chu find another drunk shriveled alley way soul to suck off, eh? I’m a father For Christ’s sake, I’m a fucking father!
Grandma says he did it for me So in reality every day of his life spent clean is a victory song that cuts so loud, the booming wound of it always reminds me that