Two Poems by Doug Draime

Teenage Angst

When I started writing
at around 15  if anyone
would have told me

that I’d still be at this
crazy-ass shit  as an old man

I would have found
my grandfather’s shiny
Remington 12 gauge

in the dilapidated barn
behind the house

and blown a hole
in them as huge as
Balzak’s belly

as long and jagged
as Whitman’s bread
as deep as

Finnegan’s Wake

Their blood and guts and
liver and bone

spewing out all over the
backyard and garden

The 9 wild cats that lived
in the barn

would have had a feast

If anyone would have
told me that

I would have murdered
more people than

Charles Starkweather

remember him?

_______________

Growing More Famous Everyday
Where Fame Is Like A Ghost Moth

He writes about the same bar he
has been drinking in every night  for years

And the same factory he’s worked
in for nearly as long.

At break time he sits in his car in the parking lot
writing poems about the people he sees
coming and going.

It is all he knows, the shitty job, the
drunk, horny women at the bar, that
he’s occasionally able to score, and detail
their sad lives in his poems.

The magazines love his work, call him
the new Bukowski, and publish those
ticky-tacky gems, one indistinguishable
from the next or the last.

He has something going, he’s in his zone,
his perfect comfort zone, like the magazines
that publish him, and think he’s the new
Bukowski, all of which, is awful damn depressing.