the emt boys

                                             Introduction
                                         
                                         remains and the ruin
                         
                                  ( A vacant second story house efficiency,
                                   holiday wrapping papers, bushels of fiber glass,
                                   worn varsity jackets and seared bleached t-shirts
                                   personally hanged
                                   lonesomely within remote corner closets,
                                   a bucket of used cleaning effluent
                                   and three gallons of fluorescent orange ammonia,
                                   as city sewers bewailed oncoming nights,
                                   ravenous roars of incoming freights
                                   reverberating throughout a bleak county background,
                                   grim terrestrial outskirts contoured
                                   in ashen shades of wasted scrap-metal,
                                   junkyard trash piled in desolate concrete yards of yesterday,
                                   those decaffeinated morning routines culminated
                                   into dulled pantomimes of inbred futility)
                               
                                      The EMT boys packed up and ran off somewhere, leaving behind a cumbrous world of lifestyle commodities, no one knows why nor where, faded Thanksgiving portraits hung in broad abandoned hallways, years of dried-out gift packaging, not a soul to claim, a niece given to night-terrors on southern Jersey's sunny-side, embryonic shelved drawers of artificial seaweed, bought her a seashell alarm clock from an amusement park gift-shop that summer, accumulating dust beside a dusty family room converter box
                                      A man's daughter suffered and
                                       grew through his indulgent seasons,
                                      alcoholic sweat rained supremely down
                                      upon his fertile brow,
\                                     a good day's work didn't pay off anymore,
                                     drunken childhood pageants brimming in peacock feathers, recycled condoms and empty cardboard cases of Miller Genuine Draft, heartlessly throwing his family away into apartment complex dumpsters, working no longer, he drinks and saunters eastern beaches at night, lamenting himself with self-inflicted hymns of toxic nostalgia.
                                 All that vain energy spent, evenings in renovated department stores, coffee lunch break Wednesdays in darkened automobile garages,  A.M./F.M. radio sucked whatever life you had left in you, too many commercials, the same overplayed songs repeating themselves, they had good intentions
                                 we all did, eventually perishing in hollow centuries of harmful speculation,
                                 sentimental pillowcases of fallen angels, delicately twisted
                                  their lord and savior into
                                  woven covenants of tattered hope and repentance
                                  upon sallow evening dooryards, patches of green lawn undulated to steady breeze, in flickering moonlight premonitions, placid hours passed throughout empty residences, spectral visions of decadent heirlooms, meaningless sequences of vanquished domestication, sordid imagery of cape-cod weekends, short-lived grocery store triumphs, the love of a girl decades ago, or the warmth of a living room mantel in December,
                                 now, she's gone, a tumbler of Bailey's and a broken soul, solemn recollections of her in tight denim, smiling in familiar solidity, she was all yours, happy then, two hearts adjoined in eternity's misplaced storeroom,
                                  the EMT boys picked up six weeks before her, carelessly rolled-out with stuffed hungover suitcases,
                               we had no idea what we were initiating, no idea how things would turn, plotting our own catacombs in early February parking lots,
                                     next to a neighborhood liquor store, everyone played a role in our thinned out days and thawed out nights,
                                     except you
                                              or maybe
                                                   you did
                                                     
                                                       
                                                           
                               
                         

                         

Jackie Susann

                                  The adult book store has always been there, desolately grim on the darkened shadowy edges of town,
                                     as deadened ghost vestiges seek out cheap nightly labor, brushing stale alley debris deep underneath cryptic carpeting, squalled then hidden, Jackie never knew her real daddy, never knew how to handle women too well neither, truth being told, she won't find out, as long as out-of-work patrons keep rolling in off soiled city sidewalks from a dreaded populace thronging in felony fetishes and embarrassing internet browser histories .
                                      On the west side of Market St, ride the blue-line down from center-city 'till you hit 30th, on accurately reckoning in retrospect one rare Thursday morning of select manumission, I jetted  A.M.A. from a detox in Chester county, afterward
                                           recalling in clarity briefly crossing an adult theater/ bookstore amalgamation one early October afternoon, ambling casually toward a regional railway station with my ex, how embarrassing the idea of going in there sober was, how miserable it would be, a steady downhill degradation of morality reaching a bleak underground apex of shameful infidelity. 
                                           It wasn't until a particular synthetic disposition gravely increased my chances of concurrence, momentarily pausing, I thought the idea acceptable, I mean on entering such a place.
                                            Now, going back a few years to a heartbreaking neighborhood scene,  admitting not the slightest bit beatific, a musty carnal aroma enveloped dingy apartment foyers, ripped scattered pages of trivial magazines spread sordidly out along bedroom hardwood tiles, anyways,
                                      On getting what I wanted a few years later,  pharmaceutical benevolence from an elderly quack a couple of ethical physicians later,  prescribing me anything from death to life to sickness, back up to heaven, then eventually incarceration.  We both got nailed, he ended up serving the rest of his life upstate in Massachusetts, isn't it something how the weather changes, fervently, how restlessly discontented a restroom door remains ajar in five dollar theater basements laced in sticky semen tattered carpeting, (penal code 550)
                                         The adult bookstore stands in drab stolid hope of rare amphetamine midnights, its neon vernacular flickering, burnt-out faded dreams of worn cement and blood bleached trousers, on a drunken spree one gritty weekend down by 30th and Market,
                                  ( the things I saw that night in Maryann's eyne, her pupils dilated to credit card initiative and decrepit finances, a man stood outside the dissolute house of horror one sallow evening in early April, shouting "free girls".... words piercing my drug-induced ken, I've been thirsty for some time biting off more than I could swallow in toxic routine, it'll all catch up eventually, maybe not tonight but soon enough,  the gentleman's club literally denting my decade old denim jeans, what I want is something that will last, in short lived seasons of century old dissipation, not hip to tongues that gather forsaken lingerie in coming freight train mornings of stale counter whiskey vapor, loosening her skirt and grasping  the nightclub epicenter, from a south-philly rowhome pedestal out into......................................