Long Liquor store Poems

As I awakened to the night terrors again it's 3am. I know I'm being monitored in my own home Ciro Gargano installs cameras to watch my every movement in order to know when I write...

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NEWS Item AP: TOGO
LOME – In an effort to topple a government set up to end a 24 year dictatorship rebellious army troops seized the state broadcasting station yesterday, then left the building but returned...

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I was born and raised in a little town by the name of Calder
That was just twenty miles south of the Canadian border
As a boy I enjoyed going to school and was doing really well
Mom sang...

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Roaring Twenties

Nostalgia and age like bacon and eggs,
With buttered toast and jam on the side for breakfast;
And coffee, and a glass of orange juice to drink,
And a memory in-between to rethink.

The day begins with boring...

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Three states
in five hours.
Maybe we’ll stop somewhere nice
like a KOA campground.
A kid can hope. It’s hot and it would be great to go for a swim. Instead we stop at the liquor store,
dad buys a...

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Today was every other day.?My boss says, 
"Hey Joe, where you going with that staple gun in your hand?"
I draw a blank on my face and turn to face his?."You don't really know, do you,...

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At nights we’d sit out on the balcony drinkin
Breathin
That thick mug air
Of a New Orleans summer evening.
Livin as easy
As they’d let us
In the bowels of the Irish Channel
Where magnolias bloom all year long
Amidst the cracked...

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You asked,
“Daddy, where’d I come from?” in your cute and charming way
The time was early morning ‘bout 6 bells
Confused you looked at my reply I guess you had to bat an eye
When I turned and...

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Cracked beer bottles and detached baby rattles in slightly untidy, black plastic wrappers.
No garbage can nor box or bag is exempt from the burrower’s thorough ransack.
Rancid rubbish, rich with unwanted tidbits, 
And the bounty -...

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That goofball husband of hers brought her to this joint to see her get drunk for the very first time. She actually plugged her nose trying to sip her first glass of beer. Good grief....

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“Thank God the Weekend’s Over”
©2021 Jerry Brotherton

It’s time to get up and go to work, that old alarm clock said.
It’s Monday and I still have her, rolling around in my head.
It’s six o’clock in the...

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THE CHECKOUT LINE

I made the phone call
he's holdin got the work. 
We gotta have the "ins" this time, 
said he wouldn't front me dirt. 
What we got between us 
still ain't enough to score
Let's hit...

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Window Teacher
                      by Odin Roark

As teacher
She was petite
Unassuming
Framed in layered paint
No make-up on her
Save...

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Mama and Daddy was always Love-Dovey
She is His Sweetheart – He is Her Honey
First Love… Real Love  -  Forever True
Pa… I Pray to find A Man Like You…

Daddy Laughed and Put His Arm...

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A young man, barely twenty-one,
On the town in search of fun.
The wrong side of the railroad track
And somehow never made it back.

A pickup truck, a black guitar…
I thought that they would take me far.
But music...

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T'was the night before Christmas and through the beer store
folks were procuring Christmas cheer by the score.
They came from near and far to get bottles of rum
to make yummy eggnog and to its pleasures succumb.

Our...

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A man walks by in a gray polyester suit 
He tells another man to call him Juice 
The other man in bright orange hunter's clothes, he looks bold and brash 
He tells Juice to call...

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I love to read Charles Bukowski
My Brother, Bill could have written like him
Sitting at a rust-leg old table in that fractured rectangle
     above a liquor store
     ...

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Mines the wonder
Living is an act of aggression. Every time I go out of the house it upsets the balance of the universe. Today I had someone tell me that things were coming undone, old...

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...It wasn’t easy living out on her own,
she was young and she made her mistakes,
went to night school to learn to cut hair,
and in the daytimes tables she did wait.

At twenty years old she was...

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I went into the state liquor store last night on the more serious side of town. It was hopping and everyone was rushing from their cars to the front door as the frigid temperatures tried...

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from a young child they were groomed
a silver spoon they new not of
they were born in the gutter
there mother was a whore
selling her junk from a trunk in back of the liquor store
many moons ago...

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gravity
homeboy got capped in the knee
out in the streets 
let the truth be told
where as years ago
with Grandmaster P
he was born in the gutter 
his momma was a whore
selling her junk in the trunk
in back...

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He’s a broken leg performer with a crooked second act.
Went from Brooklyn to Las Vegas with his sarcasm intact.
Does a Smith and Wesson stand-up, voice as sweet as antifreeze.
Tells you how he lost his cherry...

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The cob webbed city sticks to my dirty skin,
as I pass through its predator strings.
On the corners are hustlers, men with wigs and worn heels,
selling their wares, fighting with women,
over property rights.

Traffic moves slow, crawling...

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