Leeroy Berlin- Three Poems

west side, best side

we’d walk down veteran

between the cemetery and the university

whistling angler’s lures

to sexy fish

caught in flourescent nets

on the way to maloney’s

the honorable dead must have envied

our raging erections which

at the time

didn’t seem sacrilegious

but hindsight

suggests

that flinging full rubbers

over the tombstones

was some kind of sin.

under these watchful eyes

the trick to unlocking a door

surreptitiously

is to lift the bolt

with tension

even to turn the lock back

as though you’d changed your mind at the last second

but with insufficient force to stop

those urges

that drive half dressed teenagers out through their parents’

front doors

crawling through open windows

in pursuit of the testicular imperative

and the quest

for something more tactile

than textual

something that could be felt

and not seen

because what was seen was known

to those watchful eyes

that peered from second floor windows,

surveillance cams,

and satellite flybys

on our every move.

lizards in my room

i have to be careful these days

when i wake up in the middle of the night

not to scream too loudly

or jump too suddenly

so i don’t

startle my unwelcome roommates

clinging to the ceiling.

i used to chase them out with a broom

but they just came back

and after a week

in and out

in and out

i gave up.

i told them, alright you can have the ceiling

and i’ll take the floor

eat the mosquitoes and we’ll call it even on the rent.

stay out of the fridge

and don’t watch too close when my girlfriend

comes

over.

Author bio: Leeroy Berlin recently tried his hand at manual labor.  He decided he still prefers typing too much to anything that resembles actual work and went back to writing poetry and leaving the electric bill unpaid.