BoySlut

 

Memories of Winnipeg

And Crazy Eight Bar

By Michael Lee Johnson

 

I’m drunk, isolated,

and horny,

I stumble into The Crazy Eight

Bar and it wasn’t my lucky charmed night.

Flirting with Indian women, delusional

with my white ass superiority,

I’m doing card tricks,

and end up getting my guts

and rib cage kicked out.

I’m circled by Métis Indians

no facial war paint

no Indian war bonnets,

but they fooled me.

 

I’m down eating floor dirt,

and the kicks keep coming-

thick needle toe boots, cowboy style, fast and heavy.

I crawl to my car half dead barely breathing,

collapsed lungs, head on the steering wheel

I somehow how find the hospital.

Spitting blood and Apple Jack wine,

my tan suite is ruined,

I pissed my white pants yellow-

worst of all I deserved it.

So I learn, when in a strange town

find a place where the color of your face fits,

And don’t cheat at cards.

 

-2008-

 

 

Native I Am, Cocopa

By Michael Lee Johnson

 

I am mother proud

of the greatest

events that fade before me.

I dig earthworms

and farm dirt

from my fingertips

and grab native

Baja & Southwestern

California

soil & desert sand

wedged between my

spaced teeth.

My numbers or few or is it only me

a useless decay, dentures

lost in desert sand?

I gain no respect.

I once drank a Budweiser beer

out of the keg in

St. Louis, Missouri

just to make sure I was

born on north American soil.

In my heart digs many memories

and 41 relatives left in 1937.

I see praise & prayers

from native Gods.

I am Cocopa of Yuman family

and extent into the mouth

of many Colorado rivers and mountains.

Mist is my memories.

I survive on corn, melons,

pumpkins and mesquite beans-

add a few grass seeds, a hint of red wine,

burial roots of history faded on

parchment.

 

-2008-