Old Men

on the cracked sidewalk
holding their pockets together
old army jackets
patches and insignias gone

everyone of them
makes me think
-- Bukowski --
they reek of something
like whiskey

gray hands holding for
enough quarters to buy
a night train or a mad dog
-- Berryman --
why live under the bridge
overpasses to places
dream miles away

the old men stare into me
I think they search behind
my eyes but they hold out
their wrinkles for quarters

and I pay them for the lesson

(Originally published in Urban Spaghetti)




---

Hood

so I grab her ass as she bends into the car
oooh, you know that's a fantasy of mine
but don't so I ask her what she means
you know fucking on the hood of a car
and I think about her and me on the hood
of my little bmw in a parking structure like
this one but the first minute of the new year
she wants to know what I'm thinking
so I tell her and she smacks my arm saying
silly you know I'm afraid of doing it in public



---

photo courtesy CJ Sage

• Editor-in-Chief,
Disquieting Muses
• Host of FM91.5, KKUP's
"Out of Our Minds"

     Dancing Bear lives in the San Francisco bay area. His poems, art interviews, reviews and photographs have been published in many journals, including New York Quarterly, Zuzu's Petals Quarterly, Slipstream, Rio Grande Review, Pearl, Poetry Motel and Nerve Cowboy. He is Editor-In-Chief of the on-line magazine Disquieting Muses (disquietingmuses.com) and the 1999 winner of the Mindfire Chapbook Contest for his manuscript Blue Hand, later this year a chapbook Atlas(Red Fruit Press) will be released. Dancing Bear is the host of a weekly poetry show "Out of Our Minds" for public supported KKUP 91.5 FM in Cupertino, CA.

Mitakuye oyasin (All my relations),
Dancing Bear