I'VE BEEN HERE BEFORE
I ain't got nothin' to say.
You know it's like I'm down
at the precinct house
an' they're firin' questions
left and right
showin' me the rubber hose,
the telephone book they's gonna
put on my head and bust with a baseball bat.
I ain't got nothin' to say.
But I got these dreams, see,
that I can't tell nobody.
I mean they ain't nobody's business,
but if they knew, I can hear
them laugh, and I ain't no fool.
Maybe I get beat up a bit.
I don't care.
If it's not one, it's the other.
But they's all I got,
the dreams I mean, so
I ain't got nothin' to say.
LONG DISTANCE
The phone don't ring no more.
It don't matter none that
I didn't pay my bill. I mean
a long time it didn't ring.
At first I thought maybe everybody
lost my number or kept miss dialin'.
Maybe they was on vacation.
Maybe they had a fire
and the phone book got burned.
Maybe they was in a hospital
or maybe even murdered.
Then I'd think maybe they was like me
and just didn't bother any more.
Stashu Kapinski Strikes Out
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Stashu Kapinski, the guy who wrote these poems, is a sometime bum living in my skin. He doesn't get out much, but when you hear (and smell) him, you know he's noone else. He's pissed about a lot of things--being out of work for so long, the steel mills in Pittsburgh closing down, getting old, the price of beer, you name it. But he hasn't given up. There are still moments when he feels like the King of Polish Hill.
From 1986-1996, Joseph Lisowski was Professor of English at The University of the Virgin Islands; he is now teaching at Elizabeth City State University. His detective fiction novel, LOOKING FOR LISA, has just been published by Fiction Works |
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