Feast your eyes on rampant, unbridled, depravity—
impoverished by a lack of shame,
a sunken treasure, lost, no X to be found,
“Land ho!” however you may, me maties.
“Silence!
Ye bleeding, trampled thing!” The gods say.
But do I heed the relentless chitter-chatter
of their argle-bargle, bogus show?
No.
I want to want to skirt the horizon
between the potential and possible.
I want to claw myself to the precipice of the next level
and stare down at the magnitude of all that I have passed.
I want to forge ahead,
ever onward to new adventures and greater plateaus.
Take me to the bleeding edge…
I am ready for a new paradigm.
But what’s this, I see?
The countdown already begun?
And me with my pockets, once so full of quarters,
now vestibule for naught but lint and crumpled refuse…
It hardly seems fair. Barely begun
and it’s ending already.
Don’t get me wrong: you gotta pay to play
and I knew that from the start.
Thought I could play my own game—
make up the rules up as I went along—
but, the fact is: you either buy in or you’re bought out
and that’s the way it goes.
And now, there’s a voice in my head saying:
“You’re tragic, kid, but you got no guts
and you’ll never be Steve McQueen no matter how hard you try.
Just a chump, hustling for chump change,
always on the ropes, barely holding on,
some people losing money, sure, but most knowing the score from the start,
a born loser, who’d settle for a warm bed
and a plate of spaghetti.
Just another apple-knocker from Apple-Knocker Land
and there’s more where that came from, son,
believe me.”
And the countdown ticks: 3, 2, 1…
as I reach into my pocket,
frantically fish out another quarter,
pop it in and press Start.
Cause, you gotta pay to play
and I ain’t finished yet.
Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash
Devon Gallant is the outlaw poet of four collections of poetry: The Day After (Cactus Press 2006), the flower dress and other lines (Cactus Press 2009), His Inner Season (Cactus Press 2012), and most recently S(tars) & M(agnets) (Cactus Press 2015) which bill bissett called ‘a mirakul uv a book.’ He is currently working on his fifth collection of poetry entitled Bootleg Saké which blends eroticism, Dark Romanticism, Japonism, and Kinbaku. Concurrently to this project, he is also working on a sixth collection of poetry entitled Playtime, in reference to Jacques Tati’s 1967 film, which explores topics of Decadence, freedom of expression, individuality, hedonism, and play which acts as a companion piece to Bootleg Saké. His work has been previously published in Vallum, Carousel, Misunderstandings Magazine, Bitterzoet Magazine and elsewhere. He is the publisher of Cactus Press and the host of Accent, a Montreal based reading series.
