Victor Henry- Three Poems

NEON DREAMS

Those intoxicated times when I drank
All day and into the night chasing demons.
Living on overworked dreams and debauched deceptions
At NEON DREAMS, a hole in the wall dive
On desperation row, a sanctuary for vagabonds and vagrants.

I was the last drop in a bottle of stale beer,
The last shot of Jack Daniels straight up,
The last bottle of Thunderbird on the shelf.
Just another destitute drunk looking for answers,
Tossed into the Dipsy Dumpster of dashed hopes,

Passed out like a down-and-out wino
In an abandoned alley,

the last dead demon swallowed alive.



WITHOUT FEAR OR RIDICULE

He’d been fucked over, deceived, and betrayed.
One moment it was Ying, the next Yang.
The next one after that, Niagara Falls in a barrel.
Finally, he was standing on top of Mount Everest.
But, he didn’t know down from up or up from down.
Or sideways from the sidewalk either.
His life was a clusterfuck, all disorder and disarray.
He had nowhere to go, no friends, no family.
But he didn’t care, because where he was going,
he was going without fear or ridicule.



MR. HAPPY

The instructor announced the night class would read Milton’s divorce tracts, Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew, and Hemingway’s “Up in Michigan” during the semester.

Jeb, after a serious night of binge drinking with his friends, his head hazy and hollow, debated if he should drop the 101 Lit class, while his woody, horny and randy, temporarily held captive, sniffed out the talent.

Slightly familiar with Shakespeare and Hemingway in name only, but not Milton, Jeb hoped to discover how Hemingway wrote so he could advance in his job to something more respectable, something with more money. Working for $7 an hour wasn’t cutting it.

Handing out the course green sheet, the instructor encouraged his English 101 students to start working on their term paper as soon as possible, to go to the library to find reliable sources, to gather in discussion groups.

Because his loins were something he knew he could always invest in, Jeb decided to reinvent himself, feign a false front, adapt the persona of an ideal student. As he slowly piled out of class, pretty young nubile woman after pretty young nubile woman exited before him. His textbook, now his Achilles shield, concealed his aroused stiffy. In the heat of the moment, it could smell conquest.

Once again, at the urging of Mr. Happy, he’d enrolled as an aspiring student, an archetypical voyeur to his own bestial and brutish ways, in a class he would never drop out of, or, for that matter, receive a grade in.


Victor Henry is a Dead Snakes contributor, published in various small press magazines, anthologies, and e-zines.