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		Published on April 06, 1999 by Anthony V. Toscano
		Reading In The Third Person my friends carry poems in to meet me from the street, on slips of oil- stained paper, bird shit and heelprints, expensive waffle soles worn by vagrants, roaming through hollow neighborhood alleys, so the words smell bad, but I read them under a clean light just to feel disgusted by the stink romantic bums write today. Selfish, garish autographs. One man swallows what he names a bloodstream, but its only appeal is its subject, murder; the rest is just a simple story hammered down into lines; certain lines mean nothing on their own. still he presses them there to make it dress like a nude, though he refuses her (won't even consider) a return, to watch her again, some more, allow her to stare back at him, and into the slow change, the one that touches like a sculptor, cold fingers probing hard clay that fights back. move a scar from here to there, make the last pulse fit, slide the male end neat, inside the female. He did none of that, just tortured her and sent her off to the sidewalk, and from there to my room where I read her under the one lamp, till my servant, my ugly man with dirty lips and cinnamon breath asked me if heartsleeves are necessary in summertime. I noticed then that I was crying, and I could not recall the reason, whether the filth or the torn remains of heartsleeves. *** Thanks for stopping by to visit us here at the SpilledBeans.com web site. If you'd like to be notified whenever something new is posted to the SpilledBeans.com web site, then please join the Spilled Beans notification list. -- Con affetto, Anthony V. Toscano, Editor SpilledBeans.com

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