White Liquor

Let the Motel Room Neon Light be My Confessional I sliced open these hardened veins Leaving me cauterizing with alcohol yet again It's the heart or the bottle Or a combination of the two I once fucked two girls on a football field When night had fallen And their boyfriends celebrated a birthday Only yards away You have no idea of the depravity Of the secrets buried Beneath a sly smile And a horoscope of hopelessness The Real Roominghouses of Los Angeles  Hanging out  For the sweet smog-choked Southern California sun  There are much worse ways to asphyxiate  And I hold little fear of death, anyway  To lie buried beneath  A mountain of scattered screenplays and unpublished novels  In a cheap hotel room As the streetlamp flickers through the curtainless window  And the roaches scuttle with purpose across the typewriter keys  Drawing the death-rattle of the dying  I wi...

Cover concept which I put together with help from my tattooist, Tommy Bucket. All The Feral Dogs of Los Angeles From Benjamin Blake ( Southpaw Nights ) and Cole Bauer, comes the new split poetry collection  All The Feral Dogs of Los Angeles . Poems full of life, death, dust, lust and liquor,  All The Feral Dogs of Los Angeles  reads like a drunken love-letter to the City of  Fallen Angels.  Benjamin Blake  Lights & Sirens Roadside surgery Performed in back rooms of low-lit bars        I came so close to bleeding out That I made my peace with God Then renounced His very name Some things are just not worth it Patched up and back behind the wheel A quart of brandy my old-time remedy For the shivers and shakes That set in with alarming regularity These old bones won’t rattle forever I closed my eyes as I drove through her town I couldn’t bear to take it i...

Wildcats In The Cave I heard bickering coming from the basement, about not wanting to go to school, about responsibility, test scores, endless self doubt, and the oncoming storm of eighteen. Then, my wife’s battle scream from the Neolithic edge of the cave. A shriek so wild and prehistoric, it came from deep inside her ancient warm bloodedness. Mother and kitten marking pieces of territorial highland and mother not backing down. It made the dog whine and me spill my coffee. It reminded me of our basic instinctual leftovers that have lingered for thousands of years. If she was going down into the dirt, she was giving her the whole deal, eye to eye, ears back, and flea claws out. My wife roared that morning for the ultimate good of the kitten. She left her biogenetic scent through her claws like two steel smoking revolvers. Hell, there was plenty of food in the den but, this was bigger than habitation. This was hardwired wildcat develop...

Hipsters (And Why I Hate Them) You’d think every one of them was a Michelangelo by the way they grinned. I want to climb inside their bodies and drive a steak knife through the bridge of their eyeglasses

my first night back we were far apart once but you can hear my heart now in this chest, and your hair used to itch my skin if you didn’t tuck it back but you’ll never hear about it again

Apple Cid er His drunk fucking breath poured ove' my mouth. I wished he would pour some whiskey in it. It was like romance could play every tune on my body. All the importance and his love had run into the darkest corner of my heart

Gentle Hands Every day I come here it ’ s the exact same thing Hands over me and I wish... Hands under me and I wish...

Log Cabin Clearing   The outskirts of some backwoods town A young girl with olive skin And the darkest eyes Brunette hair as light as silk And a radiance like no other

Note the well worn hand holds close to the side’s pockets of

  An Ode to Heraclitus It’s true that nothing stays the same, the lead singer taking over the former crooner’s place, learning of death on a late Friday night,

A frosty afternoon, in floating fog, off a main road covered by ice, both sides of grass thick with frost,

If I were your dog If I were your dog I would begin by licking the hollow of your toes.

Dry Counties When everything slips your mind past grace notes of 50 th paralells, way up over the Bloor Street splendor of gutter punk mystics dancing shoe cymbal jigs for silvery leather of policeman’s caps; how shiny with self-serious contradiction are they in atoned posture for dead

Halfway Downs Hard earth against them, they stubbornly scramble, leaving behind the struggle, faces streaked with poverty, setting jaws like flint against the scratch