•Case 6•

Victim: Doug Russel

Age: Twenty-one years

Hair: Black

Eyes: Dark Brown

Height: 6”2

Perpetrator: Greed

I am a poet, and a good one at that. The world just doesn’t know it yet. People are obsessed with who’s breaking down and who’s having sex, so they never pay attention to guys like me. You know, the ones who sit in a desk until midnight, scribbling pentameters and couplets on lined paper.

I am part of a dying race, though I suppose I’m luckier than the rest of my kind. After all, I am the most attractive of the lot. I mean it. I’m the kind of guy fags write sonnets to, the kind that starts off like “O dark skinned Adonis, how licentious my heart is for you...” I’m the kind of guy girls fall to their knees for, begging to hear just one stanza or a small rhyme spew from my lips.

If I wasn’t graced with such beauty, I’d probably end up just like the masses of young poets; off drowning my sorrows in cheap beer and sorry sex. Well, I must admit that I use the last one to my advantage. I see no bad in it, though. I believe that if you have something, you better use it.

And trust me, I use it well.

I’m pretty good at stuff like that. It’s the only way I’ve been surviving all this time. Blurry nights gave me gigs, and gigs gave me money. I’m not that interested in the cash, though. I just want to be noticed. But to be noticed, one night with two sweaty chicks won’t cut it.

I’ve learnt that well, so instead of tiring out old faithful, I get used to the trade. I balance everything out, you see. One or two bribes after a gig, a flirtatious comment here and there, and some hard liquor so I remember nothing by morning.

It’s the perfect system to use to climb to the top; the type of system my fellow poets haven’t quite gotten the hang of yet. See, the trouble with them is the fact that they still have all these fucking morals. Morals only hold you back. That’s why I tarnished mine.

I’m a poet, after all. A fantastic one at that. And soon enough, the world will know that too.

 ~~~

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness,

starving hysterical naked,

dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix,

angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly

connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night,

who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking

in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating

across the tops of cities contemplating jazz,

who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and saw

Mohammedan angels staggering on tenement roofs illuminated,

who passed through universities with radiant cool eyes

hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy among the scholars of war,

who were expelled from the academies for crazy & publishing

obscene odes on the windows of the skull,

who cowered in unshaven rooms in underwear, burning their money in wastebaskets

and listening to the Terror through the wall,

who got busted in their pubic beards returning through Laredo

with a belt of marijuana for New York,

who ate fire in paint hotels or drank turpentine in Paradise Alley, death,

or purgatoried their torsos night after night

with dreams, with drugs, with waking nightmares, alcohol and

cock and endless balls...”

-         Allen Ginsberg: Howl, Part 1

Photo Credit: Photo by Procrust (http://procrust.deviantart.com/)