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New Bohemia
Heavy metal blares white
boy harmless in
the grim reaper traffic
home past skater
punk homes of parked vans
& trucks
on junk zombie lane
the real estate agents call
“new bohemia”
where danger & rent are
cheap barred up
flats & black crack
alleys
- better to live on that old tour bus
by the curb w/ a good lock
and a gun
McDonald’s Funeral
T’s older brother,
Japanese
American-born
- devoted to his mother -
never married.
T once found his brother
close to the television
late at night
jacking off to hot starlet
Melanie Griffith’s
BODY DOUBLE.
After stomach cancer, the
brother
watched the Food Channel
all day.
The 85 year old mother
nursed him through chemo,
went out & got him the
fast food he craved
when he could eat –
canned enchilada,
McDonald’s –
his diet for decades
–
all the stuff the probably
killed him.
One morning the brother
couldn’t rouse
the exhausted mother
and pulled his own corpse
to the huge family car
–
bald, no eyebrows, gaunt,
shrunken, pale –
cruising into the
McDonald’s Drive-Through
like the horror comics
Cryptkeeper
for his pancakes.
When he died, there were
Buddhist ceremonies, of course –
the mother found herself in
McDonald’s
buying a hamburger in his
memory
but tears wouldn’t
stop
convulsing her tiny frame
–
she had to leave that final
burger
for his ghost.
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