The Hunger

“ What do you do?” She asks.
“ I take pictures of dead people.”
Nick Seeley, Cambodian Noir

It must have been the correct answer.
She says, “Psychedelic Furs make me
feel warm all over like Ketamine and
Coke.”  Leans in close, French inhaling
some local loco weed like it was a
mentholated Kool long, eyes like laser
pointer lights on mine.
“I’m more of an Insane Clown Posse
kind of guy.  Anarchist rapping to the
apocalypse. Just a jugalo everywhere I go….”
“Want to go some place more private?
I know all the secrets of The Ages.
The ones I don’t know, I’ll make up
as we go along.”
“Sounds great to me. What’s the catch?”
“Just keep an open mind.” She says,
seductively smiling, ”Let me write
the instructions to my place for you.”
I watch her write, hand the paper to me
and turn. See her long legs disappear
into as denim mini-skirt, tank top tight
and inviting. Shoulder length black hair
sweeping across her shoulders as she walks.
Everything about her says, sex and death
and not much in between.
The written instructions to her place
are simple: Follow the long, narrow
two lane until you arrive nowhere.
Turn left and keep driving until you
can’t go on.”
It would be a place so remote even
vandals, door to door rip off experts,
and Murphy artists wouldn’t go.
It would have a five stool counter diner
no one ever went to with daily breakfast
specials with names like: Death Warmed
Over and you would order one just to see
what it would look like.  It might not be
the last thing you ever did but
awfully damned close.

Alan Catlin has been publishing for the better part of five decades. He feels like a poetry hobo and some say he looks like one too. Forthcoming from Presa Press is his book Walking Among Tombstones in the Fog and a chapbook Hollyweird, part one of along sequence in progress, to be published by Night Ballet Press.