by Rick Young | Jan 4, 2016 | Poem
My teeth were sent to outer space,
as part of some experiment with dogs
and several poker-playing cosmonauts.
Now I have a growing taste for Mars bars,
starfish,moon pies, sun drieds and plutonium,
which tastes like Tang. An old NASA joke.
At night I feel them orbiting my bed
and in my head they vibrate,
conditioned by their mission.
When I smile, some people call me "lunar"
or "mercurial." But just a few White Russians
and I’m flush for liftoff, re-entry and splashdown
in the dental sea of tranquility.
by Rick Young | Jan 3, 2016 | Poem
He’s cornered the bullshit market,
eating Denver mints
and popping pesos madly.
He’s in love with the ruble,
and makes origami wallets
out of thousand dollar bills.
He collects sand dollars,
in case Atlantis rises.
He calls his mother "Drachma."
He takes no Canadian quarter,
and calls the lira lyrical.
He cries out wildly
during stock reports,
and sleeps upon a mattress
stuffed hard with confederate bills.
His banker calls him Big Bill,
but around the office
he’s just known as Buck.
by Rick Young | Jan 2, 2016 | Poem
Brendan hucked up a golf ball
he’d swallowed several years ago
after his only hole-in-one.
It was a point of honor,
his threesome insisted.
How was he to know they were insane?
Now at least there’s something
for his trophy cabinet,
even though the cover
of his Titleist is gone,
done in, he supposed, by stomach acids.
Didn’t even look like a golf ball
any more, just a frayed pellet
of wound elastics.
And what was it they’d done to him
in the trap on the very next hole?
He remembered thinking,
"Why, they all have tweezers!"
by Rick Young | Jan 1, 2016 | Poem
I shot the night
into ragged quarters,
through a Mexican-Russian
standoff; singing
dirty songs of earthworms
and potatoes, unsteady,
alas, on amped feet,
and playing air guitar
for the ghost outside
the window.
by Rick Young | Dec 31, 2015 | Uncategorized
I tried to get a wine prescription.
Doc said that was just a fiction.
But I need my cabernet.
Couple glasses every day.
I find that it beats out pills
in defeating all my ills.
I just know I feel quite fine
with a dose of good red wine.
