DOUG DRAIME

19 Straight Whiskeys


If I would have been
there at the Chelsea Hotel,
drinking
with Dylan Thomas
the night
they drove him away
in an ambulance.
I would have told him all
the fame and booze
was mutilating
his soul.
The hangers on, writers, editors,
other drunks, leeches, and the women
spreading their
nylon legs.
All of them killing him,
or watching him die
and doing nothing to stop it.
They say he said on that night
“I’ve had 18 straight whiskeys. I think
that’s the record.”
I would have told him all that shit was killing him.
I would have cut him off at 9 whiskeys.
But then again, maybe I might’ve
kept my nose out
of his business and matched him
drink for drink,
going on and beating his record
with 19 and
leaving with one of the
women before
the ambulance arrived.





Finally Realizing



48 yrs. after
his death
he was 24
I was 12 -
you do the
math -
I am finally
realizing
I’ll never be
another
James Dean
This news will
be a
disappoint-
ment
to my
deceased
father,
who was an
Indiana
socialist,
who thought
Dean was the
only true
artist ever in
American movie
culture
Sorry, dad,
that my
biggest
acting role
was in a
film that was
picketed &
shut down
2 days after
it opened
at a
Japanese
movie
theater in
South Central L.A.
for “ exploitation
of the people.”







The Last She Said Poem


She said all my
writing was full of rage,
and morose,
and that I just used
being a writer,
as an excuse for
being a drunk and
an asshole.


I was blind drunk again and she
was driving. We were headed
down Fountain Avenue
in Hollywood, in her mini-
Volvo station wagon.


I attempted, unsuccessfully,
to push her from
the car.


Last I heard she moved back
to New York City,
and was working for a
lesbian stage actress,
who paid her in
sex and cocaine.


I’m still an asshole but I stopped
drinking








A Poem Speculating On The Mysterious
Youth Of Samuel Beckett



Beckett walked the
foggy boulevards
of Paris, weeping, crying
like a baby
like a teenage
sailor
from
Marseilles,
brooding on
cocaine and
codeine
shattered
to the core
over his beautiful and lost love
and he
added to the mix
a lot of Irish whiskey
finally collapsing
in the blackness of an alleyway
feeling
like his heart
had been pierced
by her pimp’s
dagger
and the bleeding
would never
end.






Bada Bing



Jack K. told Allen G. that William B.


Liked to fuck boys, or was that


The other way around?


Yeah, it must have been the other way around


‘Cause Allen G. liked to fuck them real real young


And he knew by sight another perv who liked to fuck boys


Though, Allen G, by definition was a pedophile


And William B. was only on the borderline


Now, Jack K. didn’t like to fuck boys but Allen G.


Kissed and told: that Jack K. liked to fuck a man now and then


Or maybe he just like to fuck Allen G. now and then ?


Nonetheless, welcome to the sex lives of your literary heroes, boys & girls.