Featured Poet of the Week --- Justin Hyde

//police came to my door with a search warrant//

said i'd spent
over thirty-dollars
on aa batteries
in one month
at the kum and go.

one of the clerks
got suspicious
i was cooking meth.

i took the officers
down the hall

showed them my
ten-dollar cd player
from wal-mart
the landfill of notebooks
spilling out of the closet
and the waste basket
six inches deep
with dead batteries.

you get paid
to write these
poems?
asked the young one
with gnarly cauliflower ear
while wrist-checking
the pepper spray
on his belt.

some guy
in ohio
owes me fifteen bucks
i don't ever expect
to see

beyond that it's self delusion,
i said
as we walked
to the living room.

get some sleep buddy
looks like you need it,
the older one
with a turkey-neck
gobbled
and reached for the door.

oh
that's the butter-knife exit,
i said
and dug one out of the couch cushions
and twisted the tip
in the rectangular hole.

where's your doorknob buddy?

it ran off
with the dish
and the spoon,
i said
and wished them luck
against the inexorable vicissitudes
despair of the shy woodchuck
and what-not.

then i peed
in the kitchen sink
popped a handful of vicodin
and wrote this poem
dedicated to myself
and anyone else out there
with a headful of
loaded dice.

Justin Hyde lives in Iowa where he works with criminals for a living. He grew up feral in a trailer park and of all the things that should have come from the union of his mother and father, well, lets just say no-one else in his family writes poetry. He was on track to become a miserable no-good son-of-a-bitch but then he had a son and the little bastard is shinning some light on his stone heart. Justin can be contacted at This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it

//had any more poems published on the internet?//

my father in law asks
with half a
thin lipped grin
as we sip margaritas
on his deck
while my wife and mother in law
cook dinner.

a few
here and there,
i say
pretty sure he's
read the one about
wanting to nut
my mother in law
or the one about my wife
breaking three of my ribs
with a rubber
mallet.

we don't really
know each other
which is a mutual
status quo
but

he's a good
guy.

closet pervert
i'm pretty sure.

or at the
very least
sympathetic to my
cause.

the small press poet

sitting at a
red light
wishing his
girlfriend
would die
in a car crash

or he'd get
cancer

or have the sack
to walk away
from his data entry job

something,
he's been exposed to little
and chanced nothing
beyond what he's lifted
from books

he knows this
more importantly
we know this:

the chicken-scratch gamble
of his arid lines
drives hummingbirds
to suicide.

lately
he's thought about
stabbing himself
in the thigh
playing it off
as a mugging
at the hands
of a crackhead
and parlaying it
into his fourth
chapbook:

the idea
excites him greatly

he's got sheaves
of notes

charcoal sketches
of the scene.

he's got everything he needs
to pull it off
but heart.

Last update : 22-11-2007 19:44

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