Bud Faust- Three Poems

Snakes

Snakes in my head
and I’m getting dizzy.

Snakes in my head
with caffeine and bad skin.

Snakes in my head
and I guess I’m getting
used to it.

Somewhere
someone is leaving
without saying goodbye.

Somewhere
an angel smiles
in her sleep
as the city lights grow dim.

Doesn’t everyone
want to watch the girls
eat each other?

Doesn’t anyone
sleep with the radio on
anymore?

Doesn’t it feel good
to feel everything
and imagine it’s nothing?

Doesn’t it?


Looking for Atlantis

Everything is broken
and well beyond repair –
the car,
my shoestring (finally),
all of the plastic forks
in the kitchen drawer.

Everything we create
is disposable,
most notably ourselves.
Every step in the
wrong direction,
further away from
the shoreline,
further into the
thickening weeds.

All afternoon I studied maps,
looking for Atlantis
in piles of prehistoric dirt.
Anything not so damned
ordinary would be nice –
a siren screaming at
the windows,
a meteor shower
through the roof,
a neighbor cursing
at his dog
in a foreign language.

Bent,
but mostly broken.

I’ve got a pack of smokes
and a roll of duct tape.
We’ll hold her together
as long as we can.
Someone get word
to the captain.

We’re going down.


Or something like that

With my luck,
she said,
I’ll probably leave you,
you’ll start working out again
and lose a bunch of weight,
finally find a decent job
and start making a
shitload of money,

or something like that.

It was right then
I knew for sure
there was no hope at all
for any of us crooked creatures,
crumbling cross-legged at
our imaginary altars,
begging for providence
undeserved and impossible,
thirteen thousand years into the ether
in an instant,
birds circling above, pissing
everywhere like rain,

but it doesn’t make a
damned bit of difference because
nothing’s going to grow
down here anyway.

She’d swallowed
a lot of things,
but she’d never be able
to swallow that.