Rex Sexton- Three Poems

OUT OF THE PAST

Dark circles under bloodshot eyes,

creases running down the sides of

her mouth, face as pale as any

inmate in jail, those cascades of

golden hair that made men stop

and stare, tangled, unkempt.  She

looked burned out, spent.

“Lorraine,” I almost whispered.

Sensing me, maybe, she looked up

from her drink, saw my reflection

sitting beside her’s in the barroom

mirror just like old times.  She didn’t

blink.

I swallowed hard at the coincidence.

And then she closed her eyes.  This

blast from the past couldn’t last.  She

must have been thinking.  It was a trick

of  the eye, some other guy.

When she opened them I was gone.

I left a fifty next to her whiskey.

I had to pay for my own drunk when

she split on me.

Those cascades of golden hair which

made men stop and stare.

Too hard, too soft, too hot, too cold,

nothing was ever quite right for her.

Goldilocks we really rocked.  I’m

out of here. I wish you luck. 

TAPS

Crawl for cover,

feel death’s finger

slide up your spine

as bullets fly and your

buddies die.

Think of your mother,

brother, sister, father,

lover, your Uncle Sam

who got you into this

jam fighting for your life

in Vietnam.

Tell the rosary on the beads

of sweat that run down your

face, neck.  Turn a deaf ear

to the moans and groans all

around you that send shocks

through your bones.

Now you are alone, wasting

away in a back street cheap room,

shot to shit at sixy-six from all

the bad habits you picked up in

combat: drugging, boozing,

hiding from the enemy which

came to be reality. 

You survived the ambush that

day and many more that came

you way.

But they made you pay.

BUTTERFLIES ARE FREE

I slice through the rain, collar up,

head down, the Regal Street rooftops

blocking the brunt of the onslaught.

The game gets out of hand now and

then, doesn’t it, when you’re living

“free and mean” as they say in the Slam?

Working against time, hard and harder,

and never getting any smarter, you get

to wonder how many nuts you can crack

before they send you back.

The chain link fences, how hard to climb?

The blackened windows with electronic

alarms, the double bolted doors, are you

ready finally?

Look back at the child, hunched and

hungry, gawking at all those glittering

streets paved with money.

The night train has no destination.

I hopped it without hesitation.

Everyone on it heading the same way,

looking out the windows at the years that

disappear, no stops ‘til you get there,

end of the line nowhere.

Fireflies and stars, fields of flowers,

you miss them most when you’re

behind those bars.

Rex Sexton is a Surrealist painter exhibiting in Philadelphia and Chicago.  His short story “Holy Night” received the Editor’s Choice Award in the Eric Hoffer Award competition and was published in Best New Writing 2007.  Recent poems have been published in reviews such as Mobius, The Poetry Magazine, Waterways, Edgz, Ardent and Taproot, recent fiction in Saranac Review, The Long Story, Straylight, Left Curve, Children, Churches and Daddies, Art Times, and Foliate Oak.