Dan Pollock-Shine your shoes

Dan Pollock-Tired Krishna

Dan Pollock-Illusions on the shelf

Dan Pollock-Blue eyes look down

"Sara In Repose"

                         Dear Sara, the grenadine grenadiers are all gone now; recklessly ambling down silhouetted evening streets of nocturnal plumage. Dampened dusk filled alleyways exhale poignant vapors of stale bourbon daydreams and cheap cigarette-end stigmatization. Black and read obituary headlines pour tepid morning coffee down stained sunday shirt-sleeves of broken ritual.
                                In grim terrestrial foreshadowing, I warn thee of a dawn orange sky effluent; draining futile lethargy down upon our cement city sidewalk children.
                                I've known much too well
                                              our whole life I've been
                                                  drowning to concrete bottoms of renovated swimming pools
                                                  skinning feeble knees on plaza fountain precipices
                                                  sharp city cistern edges scrape your scarred pale arms among  six-feet deep grave acquaintances..
                            Truthfully and congenitally, you may as well be dead with your hay-stack needle hopeful, drawn-out cutlery, and faded green tourniquet.
                                             
                                We'll continue to bleed as enervate pigs wreathed in dry heat amid fertile seasons of cornbread incest.
                             A raw county gallantry lurches blindly behind an insidious visage of malcontent.
                         The gritty uptown social worker leads us up to your homey emergency hospital bedroom, where we once pulled beige pillowcase cornices down taut over an empty dusted sill window, while celluloid wallpaper shadows tightly gripped the dim porcelain floorboard, under cushioned doors out into surreal illumined hallways of bloodline medication.

                                Back home in rural America, your exiled mother nurtures our first-born daughter with my father's baby blues, while an overcast sky vaguely crests auburn hillsides of opaque Appalachian freeways and a couple hundred years ago maybe you passed me a carved-out coconut and I sipped the love milk nakedly from the center of your body.
                                       Presently on the west-side; we nurse drunken hours with dollar-store bendy-straws, slowly dinned to dissipated lullabies beside the apartment radiator.
                                     A residential alarm-clock rasps about us now, or just for you in menial sloth- as subdued domestic ambiance emanates throughout lemon damasked hallways into an pleasantly furnished nursery; where cherry-lacquered coffee tables remain immobile through sullen afternoons of illicit fornication.
                          Our neighborhood odysseys are defunct at best. Leave me at your stepparents kitchen-sink clutching a rusted pizza-cutter, dolefully staring at a framed portrait of you in high-school with strawberry blond highlighted hair, before becoming a self-obsessed junky, my pale fingertips bled inevitably onto hardened crusts of days spent with you and your track-records warped in torn draped chambers of disillusion. We slept together on winter's soiled mattress, seethed in bedbugs and arid semen stains                    and I dreamed about jail again last night.
                          Your once servile grandmother's ashes piled in a pawnshop vase on antique fireplace mantels of lost ancestry - A dresden clock winds unwieldy minutes in the melancholy foyer.
                                                        You shot my world into your arm Sara and
                                                            what's worse is I can't even stop you
                                                               from taking your life along
                                                                               with my
                                                                                 heart.
                                       
                                                                   
                                                                         
                       

Dan Pollock A.K.A. Richard Devito "Mother I'm Lonely"

"Candy never said"

                                              She was born into it all-She had no choice.
                                              Anon highway diner parking-lot delirium; I should have known better. As a sleepless sun rose out of the Eastern Appalachians one crude morning; transcending drunken truckers down narrow crystal-meth freeways and bled yellow January evening skies. Radiant orange tapestries spread out against dawn's cloudless silhouettes.
                                             She looked placidly through awe-stricken eyes while going down on you; through city alleyways filled with expired milk-carton children,  street-cornered intersection pedestrian pilgrimages home in her young mother's stilettos .
                                              We laughed through intoxicating midnight mishaps into belligerent nocturnal transactions. Delicate florid peep-holes of pink feminine undertones temporarily released me from my painful track-records. She had grace; not god-given, fixed and learned centerfold behaviors. Candy never promised me love, warm embraces drained my hollow soul with artificial casino vibrations,  stale coffee-grinds rinsed down her-efficiency's kitchen sink;
             rusted piping and torturous night-terrors of last year; chained to her ex-husband's radiator on happy-hour Thursdays.
                                            Candy never said she was going to cure my ails, she never did and she never will. Iridescent noonday transparencies inflected luminous shadows under stolen second-story Holiday Inn curtains. We ordered take out while a late clocked poured out inevitable hours of blatant vulnerability. Humanly and conspicuous, we never had to get the authorities involved; we always did. As traffic leaked through flickering interstates of restroom innuendos.
                                             Candy never did the things she did because she had to, we had to suffer through her profession's promiscuity. Passion defied our peace and livelihood; unsatisfied lusts and unmet adolescent needs, she poured her self another, as her cellular phone rang endlessly from an feline garnished laboratory. Apartment building holidays rang out in bleak January, we made New Years resolutions that wouldn't resolve anything. Sub-conscious neighborhood shackles and fetishes, emotional S&M, parental bondage techniques applied by her family's finances.
                                           I loved Candy as she climbed out onto abrupt domestic balconies and hurled herself onto the cold unforgiving pavement.
                                          I will always love Candy, though she robbed me of my adulthood. Candy stole  joy from me- eternally depraved in planned parenthood embryos and motherly radiance. She coveted our memories with unnecessary prudence, insidiously blackmailing me with sacred memories of a young man coming into himself
       and
           her.