The Farming of Wasps

Wasps; nature's way of making us look like dickheads.
Though it could be worse
than the wasp.
Condom - used - pulled from dog's mouth
found out back
in your yard.
Or taking a shovel to mouse
on death's door
a baby, not yet grown
crawling languidly across the kitchen floor.
     He cried
in pain
                She cried
watching.
                              He died.

Returning the shovel to shed
I couldn't fight it
though I felt it
I had done the right thing
    but I still felt a dickhead.
      Such things that I do
        I'll always own up to.
As for the used condom...

...

No comment.

Ol' Cousin Ike

The Houston sun was high and hot. The air was thick and humid. With no electricity to power the air-conditioning it was hard to breathe, let alone move. Having exhausted our back-catalogue of card games and tricks, and with only 4 strings left on the only acoustic guitar available to us, there was now very little to do to pass the time other than to sit on the back porch, sipping warm, unrefrigerated beer and listen to whatever station the battery-powered radio was capable of picking up.

We found the news and the message was the same and repeated frequently. "There is no looting in Texas". As the hours wore by, I could feel the sweat form beneath my hair and my bladder grow large and hard; I faded in and out of sleep as my ears grew numb to the message. "Stores are robbed every day, sometimes at gunpoint. These are called robberies. If it happens after a hurricane, during a city-wide power cut, it is still a robbery and not looting". They stressed, "There is no looting in Texas!"

I'm still not sure how well the message sank in, or if everybody believed it. On the other side of the road, in four-foot tall letters, spray painted on the shutters of the, temporarily closed, tattoo parlour were the words: "YOU LOOT, WE SHOOT!". I guess that's why nobody went looting in Texas.

When Nature Calls, Hang Up.

It was just another one of those nights. One of the good ones. Coming out of a club, drunk, with a pretty girl on my arm. I'd like to pretend they happened more often, but in truth they don't, but that is besides the point. Covered in a thin film of sweat from drinking too much and trying to dance in a massively overpopulated space, the warm, late-summer air was doing very little to cool me down. I wanted to get home as quickly as possible, preferably with the pretty-girl-in-tow.

I wanted to move on, she wanted to stay. Or at least wait. She had a friend still inside and wanted to make sure she was okay and had a way of getting home that wouldn't see her molested or regaining consciousness in a gutter by the side of the road at 6 o'clock in the morning when the milkman made his route past her. She was a good friend. But it left me in a dilemma as I really needed to get moving. Nature called.

As much as I love booze, at times it is not my friend. Taking more effect on my body than on my mind, I could feel it pressing down on my bladder and making an overly desperate attempt to escape. An unwanted bid for freedom by my body's unwanted fluid. Now was not a good time. I had to let it loose and I didn't want to lose the girl. There was no way I was going to sit with this feeling on a bus back to wherever we were going to end up and I sure as hell didn't want to be waiting - hopping from one foot to the other - for her friend to finally come out of the club. Life would be so much easier if I was just allowed back in to the club to drain. The bouncers were having none of it. They had worked far too hard to get anyone and everyone out in the first place that they weren't going to jump at the idea of undoing that by letting anyone back inside. I had to be the dirtbag. I had to find a private place in public.

My first question was "where to go?" The club spilled out into a trash-filled, dirty, little side-street and usually that would be enough. It would be a haven for the deed I would need to bestow upon the world. It wouldn't be a problem, either; it rained enough around here to wash the streets clean of any binge-drinkers' bile and filth. Being a side street wasn't enough though. There were the masses. The runts and the fuckwits. Drunk with no place to go. Just hanging here, there and everyfuckingwhere they could lay their feet to save themselves from having to go home. Some too drunk to leave. Some too desperate. Well, I needed to wade through this bunch of pricks, scenesters and wannabes and find myself a place to let rip. Every little alley and sub-road that led off this back-street was full. Kids chatting. Kids copulating. Kids dragging on weed and kids vomiting. There was no place left for me. No place except one road. One little diversion from the party. One little route to privacy. I'd nip down there. Nip down my flies. Let all hell break loose and then find the pretty girl again, in time for her friend to arise. Simple.

Little did I realise that where I was pointing was in fact the entrance to the car park of a nearby police station. It was dark, how was I supposed to know that's what it was? Where were the signs? In my ignorance, I didn't react to the car pulling slowly down the backstreet. I merely turned my back a little to try to save myself a little dignity. It wasn't until I took a startled double-take that I realised the nature of the mechanical beast bearing down upon my call of nature. The lights on top were a dead giveaway and triggered my deadly panic in the dead of this night. I tried to stop myself midstream but knew that was no good. I could at least hobble away and try to drain the last of it as I escaped. There'd be the masses back around the corner. I could disappear amongst them. The beer was cold tonight and plentiful. It had taken its toll completely on my bladder and at this moment it was relentless. I couldn't stop. It wouldn't stop. I felt the firm hand on my shoulder that would spin me around. I tried desperately to hold it in. It wouldn't stop. It would never stop. It splashed - it poured - freely on to the shoes of the, at first unimpressed but now irate, police officer's shoes. At this point I realised it would take a lot of charm and sweet-talk to get me out of this one. It was time to bid the pretty girl goodnight.