Author: Kronski

I hurt all over most of time.

Fractured vertebrae thoracic.

Left ankle broken, some sweet trick.

Some people think they’re above crime.

Seventh rib on right side fractured.

I hurt all over most of time.

Insurance helps, but on my dime.

Sternum broken; seatbelt secured.

Lower back pain walking in boot.

Rollator use is uphill climb.

I hurt all over most of time.

Whose fault it was, she will refute.

Breathing is rough with sternum slime.

Coughing, clearing lungs is torture.

Does she know, or have they told her?

I hurt all over most of time.

Here, in the empty warehouse I am reading a whole book about a poem I have never read. From this angle above the pages I only see sky—I could be floating. 

The apartment floor, where a record skips, taunts me with agitated art—like the poem, the book. My fingernails are crooked and chipped, I see, and ink stained (perhaps a hopeful thing)—and every now and then, through haunted blue windows, a hawk devours the sky. 

A malignancy of apex predators is on the prowl. They maneuver at night from bar to bar, fanning out as solitary hunters. It’s the birds they’re after. White silkie hen, Blue-throated fantail, Lady Amherst’s Pheasant, and European Shag. They beguile with confabulation, bald-faced lies, and a killer smile. Like poison candy, the birds swallow it all, falling all over themselves preening, tweeting, and chirping, in party-dress pink and lollapalooza-red. But the apex predator turns it on and off like a spigot. No one hears their mournful howl, the subterranean grieving of an imposter; emotions threatening to dysregulate. Prey—idealized, devalued, and discarded.

The night you knew what was full of shit and what wasn’t 

was the night you went to see 

A Michael Jackson impersonator. 

In Central London. 

Dinner out & How much money it cost, 

the boozy piss up before 

You got so drunk, and the first five minutes were just occasionally brilliant, 

Then the moonwalk, it wasn’t what Michael was, 

It was a meticulous job, studied, but it wasn’t supposed to be anything than the real thing

This was not the real thing.

The people you were with,  

that you’d followed to England the year after they left the States, 

they thought it was the greatest thing they had ever seen.

you were bored, 

you were very drunk, 

you went home early,

alone.