Spilled Ink

vivianasimos:

Everyone stinks of cigarettes
and hopes drowned in cheap
beer and week-old grease.
They quiet silences with talk of hunting
and stuff mouths with bloody meat,
washed down with a glass full of bullets. 

The sun strikes with rays of bullets,
burning skin like crushed cigarettes,
ash shoved into tender meat.
The air suffocates, thick and cheap,
constantly searching and hunting
for a throat to coat with grease. 

Everything is coated in grease:
the parking lots littered with shells of bullets,
the woods and men hunting,
the gas stations and boxes of cigarettes,
the strip malls filled with cheap
boxed wines and old meat. 

They eat only unidentifiable meat
and different colored grease.
And everything tastes so cheap,
chewy fat or tough as bullets,
dissolving in saliva like worn cigarettes,
food that mold successfully hunts. 

And, oh, how the men hunt!
For anything that resembles meat,
mouths open for swears and cigarettes,
guns gleaming with grease.
Deer run from sudden bangs! and bullets;
a life seen as nothing but cheap. 

That’s all that matters: cheap.
Discount stores for bargain hunting
20% off of televisions and bullets
And, look, half priced canned meat
Two for one bottles of bacon grease.
Leaving enough money for our cigarettes. 

It’s filled with cheap mattress stores and restaurants with
greasy tables and meat. Look out for stray bullets that
hunt for those that stray from this cigarette life.