Poetry
DESTINY for FL, for VH
the K-mart picture of a flower pot cooks in splashed sunlight
and the wall broils a cup of plastic ice
two assholes you’ve never talked to in your life help
you shuffle to the shitbowl. Destiny presses
the numbered keypad while the phone rings,
circles your $3000 a week metal bed
shouting common everyday phrases as if
you were rock headed & deaf, a bum, a bum from Naples or graveyard Brooklyn,
a no-account pug, a scum with no connections
Destiny arrives with your handsome nephews, their wives
curvy in all the fine places, a commotion of earrings & silk dresses
Destiny favors that fat Irish bastard farting on the other bed
who is packed, waiting to be rolled out inside his lawyer’s bags
Destiny insists you drink your chicken broth, a toothless beggar
Destiny laughs because you won’t be falling asleep in that armchair
in your side office, Sambuca dangling from your sleeping hand
near the broccoli and grave vine draped wall in Forked River
Destiny scams you 3 times a week, a kidney machine
takes all your blood and only returns what you need
to feel cold again. And Destiny crayons your skin thin as an onion, yellow as October squash leaf
while you mumble shitty movie scripts, Destiny doesn’t listen
because Destiny only rubs her tits against lips that sing
Destiny has blue toes that stain your sheets
Destiny smoothes what’s left of your hair
Vaselines your mouth scabs, eyelids, ears
Destiny sits crossed legged on your chest
like a slinky Atlantic City stripper
in your lair on Queen Anne’s Ave in Teaneck
you clinked scotch glasses with Lyndon Johnson
that bloated cocksucker bastard, and tossed spaghetti
with Robert Kennedy’s lefthand FBI man
but you can’t find a dwarf Guatemalan nurse
when you need her to scratch your sandpaper chin
Destiny whispers in you ear, What do want want now?
Destiny reminds you that sleep is a gift
only she can give, your mistakes, both cheap & expensive
even fuckups racing with flying sharp elbows
to nothing, every deal you put together, all the people
you crewed wiped off the map, tutti niente
ten minutes could be never
or six eye sockets rolling around in the wind
could use up a year, Destiny opens
and Destiny closes again
You can’t complain, you can’t complain because
Nobody listens
What id you could and they did pay attention,
what would you say? Your solider Anger snears:
I’d slap those bitches away from my face,
those lowlife panyhosed queers with false teeth like razors
I’d read them the riot act in Florentine, in soft school boy Italian
then I’d make them wish their prostitute mothers had never had them
But Destiny is a cruel bastard and more, all business
a tall Sicilian spitting pint nut needles on a black horse without a saddle
bullets crisscrossing his fierce brown chest
his wolf gun at your head, his knife in your ear
his henchmen are bandits, like you when you wore a wide hat
on Carmine, on Elizabeth, on Sullivan Street
before the southpaws took over the restaurants
I’d like a side order of destiny, please, hold the mustard mayo and ketsup
Destiny is unrelenting, holds all the menus, but can’t read
Destiny wears a widow’s black dress, a torn rag
knotted at her neck, corn-powdered & sagging
Destiny serves the same soup again and again
but this time it’s the one you always like to remember
your best last meal of garlic oxtails tripe basil & rabbit
flies buzzing near your ears all around your halo head
out and down through the window to the courtyard
that you can only enter, a place no one ever comes back from
an alley between tenements crowded with cousins
you can’t see but can hear touch taste always
smelling of sliced onions raisined oil and burnt orange peels.
Destiny, Destiny is whatever you must eat next
without a tongue, without a flinch of trembling

- 1999-2002 av
Contributor
Angelo VergaVerga curates and hosts spoken word & poetry readings at The Cornelia Street Café.
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