Having Finished Painting The Basement Stairs Golden Poem by Ted Sheridan

Remembering…..
A 1969 that will never be again.
What was once true
will forever be called a lie.
1969 was the year the jungle
grew over my precious youth;
strangling me of life with fever
killing my soul with gangrene
while the promise of a better living
created through chemistry
and the unclear effects of Agent Orange
were covertly defoliating my brains.
1969 the year my index finger
was hot glued and frozen in fear
on the steel trigger of a weapon
filled with a magazine of death.
A year when dark slanted eyes
clashed with blue,
green and brown round eyes;
eyeballing the horror while
both seeking shelter from
a deadly rain of shrapnel and gas.
1969 a year when sleep was a luxury
only dead men could afford,
while the living went deeper in debt.
Paying for a temporary escape;
with the smell of dirt cheap opium and grass
burning like a collective sheer madness
in the barrel of a sawed off shotgun
being passed between brothers
all wearing symbols of Peace,
hung like a noose around their necks…

Here comes the brand new champagne soaked
Baby New Years, clad in a wet diaper
with a flashy banner declaring 2009
To be a very bad and depressing year.
What with a lack of checks and balances;
my accounts all in the rears.
Bloody fingers scratching at a
body’s diseased and cancerous coffin;
seeking a more permanent arrangement
than just the final will and testament
of a life spent dodging bullets and dogshit.
When I decide to end it all
please don’t morn my passing, but smile
because I’m gonna do it in the basement
just so those who come to take me
will have to carry me up those golden stairs….

2008 © TS