Five Poems by Tony Pena

 

Ding a Ling Ling

 

The bronze bell rang, atop the motel’s counter with birch carved up with fake initials by lovers haunted by discretion .The chime beckoning a dead reckoning from the hair of Pavlov's dog, in linens lined with bloodthirsty bedbugs, when thoughts of his lover’s nipple on the tip of a stranger’s tongue hijacked his every thought with an offended eye towards the old testament’s fury as written in the dog-eared pages of the Bible in room thirteen.

 

Hogtied

 

It’s the parts unknown that weave lariats around the proponents of peace in mind, dragging them through the dust of bone into dungeons dank and merciless, clouding vision and altering perspective until rustlers herd our sensitive selves with numbing concoctions of artificial relief. Catatonics led into corrals where bodies and minds prepped for the slaughter, and the smug cowhands know damn well that if you give the weak enough rope, they will certainly err, to the death, on the side of abandoned caution.

Rubbed Wrong

 

Gladys sits in her usual

booth in the Eldorado

diner down a dingy block

from the YWCA dorms.

 

Eves as thin as her body

burning holes in her purse

as she drowns three packets

of Splenda in black java.

 

The short order cook,

Ramon, don’t flirt anymore

after he caught a wind of

one of her coughing fits.

 

A wretched howl

like some beast raging

in the darkness of a B

horror film from the fifties.

 

Leaving before the midnight

close, Gladys rubs keys

from a foreclosed home

against the black metal shine

 

of Ramon’s new Wrangler

as a pretty car can surely

handle a scar better than

a heart worn down to rust.

 

 

Small Dog in a Smaller Universe

 

Pecs aching from posing 

like an oak chest with a bass 

bark bellowing from empty 

drawers at the pearly scales 

of Pisces warning the silvery 

fish to flee to the far off edge 

of the celestial sea, yet the shiny 

spine of stars holds fast, knowing 

damn well the buffalo balls

beneath fur and reckless bluster,

the only big parts of this cuddly, 

only once in a blue moon ,cur.

 

 

This cat got no tongue

 

Some days, more than I care to admit, I just laze about like an old fat cat with neither, the appetite or the energy to pounce on any prey. A feline bloated with the blahs. With black fur greying, not even badass enough to strike fear in the faintest of hearts on Friday the thirteenth.

Too proud to purr for attention, I just sit in front of the window, not to admire the savoury scenery, but to spy my once spry reflection, in stunned silence of how long and white my whiskers have grown overnight.

Tony Pena was formerly 2017-2018 Poet Laureate for the city of Beacon, New York.  

The words have flowed intermittently over the years like a temperamental river with several poems rescued in the flood waters over time but most recently by Mono, The Erozine, and  The Rye Whiskey Review with Best of the Net nominations in 2019. 

A volume of poetry and flash fiction, "Blood and Beats and Rock n Roll," is available at Amazon.  

A chapbook of poetry, "Opening night in Gehenna," is available from author.

Colourful compositions and caterwauling with a couple of chords can be seen at:

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