Tag: John Tustin

BENEDICTION

Here comes the vomit before the sleep can come,
Right into the toilet.
I make that loud noise from the bottom
Of my throat.
It comes and then it comes again.

I bow my head.

Tonight I think about you as I puke pink
And I puke green
Into a porcelain still shiny from the last
Cleaning. I drank a lot and I wrote a poem
So that’s something.

I feel better when it comes out
But how it hurts hurling up from the depths.
The nights to come are finite and I see in the distance
The final flicker. It’s closer than before.
I’m afraid but I also feel better already

Thinking about my various poverties
And the coolness of my pillows
While I spit out the final puke
And wipe it from exhausted unloved lips, praying:
May this be the last poem I write about you.

I bow my head

And pray.

©2023 John Tustin All rights reserved.

John Tustin’s poetry has appeared in many disparate literary journals since 2009. fritzware.com/johntustinpoetry contains links to his published poetry online.

JESSIE THE PRO

I got out of my car and got to her door
after getting all those directions
and she was not good looking
but she was good enough

with a big gut and saggy tits
but a kind-of pretty face

so I walked in and asked her
after a little smalltalk
if she wanted the money now

and she said no –
that I had a kind face,
that she knew she could trust me,
I could pay her at the end

and that made me start to feel bad
but not bad enough

as I kept the money rolled up
in the right front pocket
of my pants
that were dropping

to the floor of the dimly lit room
with the blackout curtains
and the unmade bed right next to the door.

©2022 John Tustin All rights reserved.

John Tustin’s poetry has appeared in many disparate literary journals since 2009. fritzware.com/johntustinpoetry contains links to his published poetry online.

IT IS NOT GOOD TO BE THE ONE

It is not good to be the one
who is noticed
among the thousand prisoners
being shuffled down the gray hall
in gray jumpsuits and manacles,

so keep your head down,
flow like water among the rows.
Keep your place.
When your number is called,
don’t respond too quickly or too loudly;
too slowly or too softly.
Be like Baby Bear’s bed.

It’s best when they need to be reminded
of your name.
Do everything carefully and well
but not too well and not too swiftly.
Don’t be the first one to wake up
and never volunteer.
Stay a few bodies on either side of the middle.
Don’t be either the first in line
or the last.

It is not good to be the one
who is noticed.
There is a Japanese Proverb –
“The nail that sticks out gets hammered down.”
Stay in place. Hold on tight.
Don’t let them remember you –
the men who wield the hammers.

Don’t wear a mask
and don’t look directly into the camera.
Keep your head down without averting your eyes.
After you’re dead,
let there be statues of someone else.
It is not good to be the one.

©2022 John Tustin All rights reserved.

John Tustin’s poetry has appeared in many disparate literary journals since 2009. fritzware.com/johntustinpoetry contains links to his published poetry online.

Abundance of Graves

When I was a boy, death came often enough –
Grandpa, grandma, aunts and uncles.
Sometimes a neighbor, a celebrity of whom I was aware,
The newspapers told me all the time about strangers, of course
But it was an anomaly.
It was rare enough that learning of some of these deaths remain memories
Of my childhood and young adulthood.

Now there are an abundance of graves when I close my eyes.
My mother, my stepbrother, my mother-in-law added to the tally.

I told my father at dinner at his home one night that it seemed all the people of my childhood
Were suddenly dying off. It was happening at such a fast clip I couldn’t keep up.
When I would look up an actor or a writer I remembered but had not heard about in a while
They would more often than not be dead – often very recently.
My father told me it was when he was the age I am now that the realization came to him –
Every adult he knew as a child was dead or would probably die soon.
Almost every person in every movie my father watched as a child is now dead,
All his teachers, the man who owned the candy store.
Most of the adults he knew in his old neighborhood are dead
And some of their children, too.
Good Lord.

Every month my world gets smaller and lonelier.
For every ten people that leave me only one replaces them.
Ghosts float in and out of every memory, addled and full of fear.

The abundance of graves is an overabundance.
The filled holes in the ground spreading farther than the mind can fathom.
Caskets float down the river and dam it up in the distance.
Bodies stack up high on every side of me in the puddles formed by the dammed water,
Only to be stacked higher and higher
And when I am gone, even higher still.

©2022 John Tustin All rights reserved.

John Tustin’s poetry has appeared in many disparate literary journals since 2009. fritzware.com/johntustinpoetry contains links to his published poetry online.