The Busted Neon Loneliness
I drink overpriced Chardonnay in a Tenderloin joint
that’s all empty flash and hipster art strewn about
steampunk walls
I’ve run out of poems
and pretty things to say
and I’ve got nothing left with which
to poster paint the void
no defense against the day
other than to get drunk and walk
the downtown streets
with the suicides and pretty girls
as ash from distant fires drifts
down like snow
blanketing the busted neon loneliness
of massage parlors and lotto machines
and there’s a man on a stretcher on Post Street
gasping for air with his dirty belly hanging out
and in Chinatown old men sit on crates
smoking outside the butcher shops
staring through the muddy years
and I breathe it all in like a sick perfume
the beautiful terror of it
is the answer to everything
and it makes me ashamed
for every time I ever asked for anything
every time I thought to taint the hours
with dreams of purpose
and I just want to dissolve
into the laughter of the televisions in the corner bars
and the smoke from the cigarettes held just so
in the skinny fingers of the girls huddled outside the gentleman’s clubs
and just drift with the ghosts of the forgotten poets
and the crazies and the long dead bartenders
embracing the terrible music of it
becoming a golden bright nothing
caught in the amber of the day
like an empty god drunk
on the fire of everything.
Nervous Eating
Back when I was a young man
still living at my parents’ place
I’d sit up late in the den
watching tv, sipping on something
I’d swiped from the liquor cabinet.
I’d hear my dad shuffle in the kitchen,
he’d open the fridge,
and start eating on anything
that didn’t need to be cooked
or heated up.
He’d stand there
munching on whatever,
and every now and then
he’d say, What’re you doin,’ boy?
Watching tv, I’d say,
what’re you doing?
Nervous eatin’,
he’d reply.
It was a phrase my mom used as well,
sighing about the weight she’d gained
from all her nervous eating.
I was never quite sure
what they were always so nervous
about, as more often than not
I wasn’t aware of anything
particularly troubling
going on.
Of course now,
some thirty years on,
I understand perfectly well
that they were nervous about
the persistence of time,
unpaid bills,
their useless kids, old age
and sickness unto death,
the future
and the past,
the living and the dead,
any number of other things
that make up an ordinary life.
And I think of my father,
now long gone,
as I stand in the cold
light of the fridge,
folding lunch meat
into my mouth
at 1:42 a,m.
William Taylor Jr. lives and writes in the Tenderloin neighborhood of San Francisco. He is the author of numerous books of poetry, and a volume of fiction. He is a Pushcart Prize nominee and was a recipient of the 2013 Kathy Acker Award. He recently edited Cockymoon: Selected Poems of Jack Micheline, published by Zeitgeist Press in 2017. From the Essential Handbook on Making it to the Next Whatever is his latest collection of poetry.
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