by Jonathan Shaw

When I felt the evil
the sting of the whisky
the pain
her effort
to leave me jibbering
and defunct
i killed her
snapping teeth and clumsy reptilian hiss jungle combat
hands on throat
killed
dead
darkness
numb..

and when I came to
i found her dead in the bed
beside me
no longer warm and grimy
no longer alive with battle
warmth, screaming, breathing
no longer
alive.
Dead.
Like a flattened dry snake in the road
she was
DEAD…
far away and faded
like a yellowed snapshot
deserted in the halls of time
like
a frozen birthday party
rats streaming over the cake
dead
cold
blue
silent
forever…

by Jonathan Shaw

damnfool rain came pourin like jackpot
inna my life today

burned-out windshield visions
of melting tires
and cities lost

Rainman sez: More Tomorrow
Ballgames cancelled
Meetings Postponed
Communications Down—
children lost catsndogs

the old man is snoring

by Jonathan Shaw

i walk away
i think i got it beat
this system of dots and corners
as i get in my car
shivering
driving home
to crawl between the sheets
where my lover sleeps
and she’s got it beat too i think this system
as she sleeps
i draw close to embrace her
but she wakes up sharply
she pulls away

All truly great thoughts are conceived by walking. -Friedrich Nietzsche

Rio De Janeiro, 1973

As if on cue, a loud discussion broke out among the guys playing cards at the table off to the back as one guy with an enormous gut protruding from a frayed open shirt produced an enormous butcher knife and began waving it around drunkenly.

The two armed guys who’d been standing talking easily said something derisive and walked out into the street waving their arms in disgust as if the whole scene was beneath their dignity. I figured that was as good a time as any to take my leave too and stood up, paying the poker-faced barman who gave me a quick mechanical thumbs up with out taking his hooded eyes off the ensuing confusion at the back as though he’d seen it all before.

So had I, I thought ironically now as I walked out into the dirty night.

Copyright Jonathan Shaw 2009.

Look what we found on gossip blog JustJared. I guess Copacabana is the place to be these days! Thanks to Nara for sending the picture.

Rio De Janeiro, 1973.

I suddenly felt myself becoming perceptive to the unseen wave lengths around me, like a baby cockroach testing its antenna. It wasn’t a sense of immediate danger or even subtle menace that struck me, so much as a sense of a new kind of awareness that had suddenly sprung up inside me. I sensed my surroundings and the sudden knowing that I was in a place here where life was very cheap.

But I felt comfortable, even slightly elated as I casually slid onto a battered stool in a sordid little shack of a bar where a bunch of men sat openly snorting cocaine at a folding tin table littered with glasses of rum and playing cards. A couple of skinny black guys stood against a back wall and I noticed the telltale bulges of rusty revolvers tucked in their waistbands. They gave me an easy, knowing nod as I sat, downing my cheap rum and that was that. Bandits or not, it was obvious from their easy confident stance that one of the unwritten codes was not to shit where they lived. When I ordered a bottle of beer to chases what was left of my cheap rum, feeling a pleasant buzz now and deciding to splurge, the pock-faced barman casually offered me a small cellophane packet of white powder to go with it. I politely refused and the man sitting next to me, a light skinned shirtless flat-faced mulatto casually produced a rumpled bill and handed it to the barman who wordlessly slid the packet to him across the bar.

As easily as that he tore open the packet and emptied the contents, about a gram I guessed, into his glass of rum, stirred it with his finger and then downed the lot in one gulp, cool as a cat. That was a new one, I thought to myself as he slid off the barstool and dropped a coin into a battered jukebox that responded with a scratchy distortion of some otherworldy ancient Brazilian rock and roll. He smiled dreamily, eyes glazed over now as he swayed back and forth.

Copyright Jonathan Shaw 2009.