Famous Last Words
The blindfolded authority figure
prods me with her diagnostic firearm.
“There is no such thing as a breakdown.”
she murmurs, “think of it as a transition.”
Change puffs upriver like a tube-girded
tug hauling throwaway things. Maybe
it’s time to argue mitigating factors,
surrender to the mercy of institutions.
I’ve stocked up the shelter I buried
in the back yard with round blue pills,
left a few user-friendly tropes for the kids,
directed my executor to plant a smile
on my kisser. The breath goes now.
All I ever possessed was amnesia.
Free Advice
Strung out in an out-of-season cutout.
the angel-tressed ex-prez of the MYF,
asked what she’d been doing, advised.
“Don’t mess with drugs.” Shoulda,
woulda, coulda been a better person if I’d
given half an eye to the copybook headings,
heeded some bumper stickers, heard out
Chesterfield advising his son to be “pleasing,”
Winging it, acts of improvisation,
not doing what I was told was how I rolled,
but I’m freedomless for my freelancing,
a nametag sewed on a corpse’s clothes.
“If I were you,” begins some barfly pal.
And I, “Oh, please. Could you be? And now.”
Chris Bullard lives in Philadelphia, PA. In 2022, Main Street Rag published his poetry chapbook, Florida Man, and Moonstone Press published his poetry chapbook, The Rainclouds of y. Finishing Line Press published his chapbook, Lungs, in April and his work appeared in Keystone: Contemporary Poets on Pennsylvania, this May.
The blindfolded authority figure
prods me with her diagnostic firearm.
“There is no such thing as a breakdown.”
she murmurs, “think of it as a transition.”
Change puffs upriver like a tube-girded
tug hauling throwaway things. Maybe
it’s time to argue mitigating factors,
surrender to the mercy of institutions.
I’ve stocked up the shelter I buried
in the back yard with round blue pills,
left a few user-friendly tropes for the kids,
directed my executor to plant a smile
on my kisser. The breath goes now.
All I ever possessed was amnesia.
Free Advice
Strung out in an out-of-season cutout.
the angel-tressed ex-prez of the MYF,
asked what she’d been doing, advised.
“Don’t mess with drugs.” Shoulda,
woulda, coulda been a better person if I’d
given half an eye to the copybook headings,
heeded some bumper stickers, heard out
Chesterfield advising his son to be “pleasing,”
Winging it, acts of improvisation,
not doing what I was told was how I rolled,
but I’m freedomless for my freelancing,
a nametag sewed on a corpse’s clothes.
“If I were you,” begins some barfly pal.
And I, “Oh, please. Could you be? And now.”
Chris Bullard lives in Philadelphia, PA. In 2022, Main Street Rag published his poetry chapbook, Florida Man, and Moonstone Press published his poetry chapbook, The Rainclouds of y. Finishing Line Press published his chapbook, Lungs, in April and his work appeared in Keystone: Contemporary Poets on Pennsylvania, this May.
