Poetry: Selections from John Tustin

Drunk in Bed

Drunk in bed just after a half-hearted shower.

Reading Li Shangyin, Du Fu, Chen Tao.

It’s finally a cool night.

I keep coughing and I’m dizzy.

How many more nights? I ask.

I sit naked and read, the last bottle almost empty

And sitting still cold by my side.

How many more nights? I ask again.

The bottoms of my feet are dirty

But there’s no one in my bed to complain

Tonight -

Another night in these less and less nights.

How many more nights? I ask a third time

And then fall asleep drunk beside the painted words

Of Li Shangyin, Du Fu, Chen Tao,

Me.

Eating Campbell’s Condensed Potato Soup

Eating Campbell’s Condensed Potato Soup and crumbling in some generic saltines,

Wearing my only pajama bottoms that are frayed at the bottom almost up to the knee

And no longer wondering why you don’t love me anymore.

I get it now. Funny how I understand so much now that it doesn’t matter.

I’ve wanted to die all at once but little by little it is. Fucking fate.

I see the little pieces of me drifting away into the nothingness when I sleep at night.

I have this heat rash in my armpits and my stomach always hurts,

Never mind the Gold Bond Powder or the generic Zantac.

One day nothing will itch or hurt and I am ambivalent about that. However,

There’s a young lady with pale green eyes and sometimes I dream she wants me

When I’m not having the usual bad dreams and I think about her wanting me right now

As I spoon the soup down my gullet and pretend I feel full and she is real,

Sliding my rotten body into the fresh sheets, hopefully to pretend tonight

A little bit more,

A little bit more.

Her and Your Perspiration 

I had a dream last night

And in my dream I was in my bedroom

With this stunningly beautiful Brazilian woman,

Chubby and a little younger and perfect.

I don’t know who she was or why she was here

But I felt myself wanting her.

I was standing beside the bed

While she was under the covers, her body and

Black black curls wet with the perspiration of a fever.

I got into bed with her,

Feeling the heat emanating from her delightful but ailing body.

She had her back to me, sleeping or attempting to

And I lifted the heavy hair from the back of her neck

About to kiss her there

When the scent of her perspiration hit me:

She smelled like you.

I woke up

Not knowing what I would have done next

And I still don’t.

I am the Coyote  

I am the coyote

Searching for the flesh in the dark

In among the vegetation and the garbage cans

In this 2021 USA.

 

Here I am, looking,

Not for flesh as much as

Just wishing for you.

 

I am the coyote

Gallivanting in the moonlight

With the silhouette of his other

In the moonlight

 

While the moon is full

And I am wishing you were there

To share the little flesh there is

To tear

In this moonlight tonight

 

As I howl lowly

Just before the moonlight

Acquiesces

To the sun

That should say hello to us

But does not

 

And I tear my bloody teeth

Into almost nothing.

Solitaire

He and I stand sometimes side by side and sometimes back to back and we work,

Endlessly filling slot after slot,

Often crossing arms and getting in the way of the other.

While we work I am thinking about how you and I never met in person

Yet for some reason I keep thinking about kissing you

Or lying in bed with you, your leg around my thigh as we talk about poetry

Of the Tang Dynasty

And then I start thinking about how I drank a big bottle of Merlot two nights ago and

Fell asleep only to wake up and puke purple into the toilet

And all over the floor and walls of the bathroom –

My coworker talking and talking all the while

About some television show

Of which I have no knowledge and even less interest

And I just keep playing this game of solitaire in my head,

Turning over the card that debates what I plan on eating for dinner tonight

And placing it over the card that holds the memory

Of that time when I was eleven years old and I pretended to be sick

So I didn’t have to go to Confirmation class because I couldn’t memorize The Apostle’s Creed

But my mother made me go anyway

And I got a failing grade.

John Tustin’s poetry has appeared in many disparate literary journals in the last dozen years. For a complete list of his publication credits click here.