issue61marktwain

                                   ZYGOTE IN MY COFFEE.COM

***BIO*** Tony O'neill is 26 years old and used to be a musician until it all fell apart and he found himself with no viable life skills and a voracious heroin and cocaine habit he could no longer afford. lost years in los angeles seedier neighbourhoods followed but now he has crawled out of the gutter and lives in new york with his wife and child where he writes. his first novel "Digging The Vein" is due to be published at the end of the year on contemporary press in the US and canada. a short story / poetry collection is in the works for a UK release on Social Disease, entitled "Songs From The Shooting Gallery". you can find more by him on laura hirds showcase (www.laurahird.com) and 3am magazine (www.3ammagazine.com) as well as literary vision magazine (www.litvision.org).

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MARK TWAIN AND I

by Tony O'neill

I nearly died, went half insane
between your peeling yellow walls
lying on the collapsing double bed
waiting for the phone to buzz into life

I bought stacks of porno magazines:
“Barely Legal”, “Backdoor Whores”, that kind of thing
and painted portraits of the most emaciated
fucked up looking girls in there
with stolen paint and abandoned canvases
dragged out of Hollywood dumpsters:
I’m no painter but it gave me something to do
while I was coked out, bleeding, manic and crazed

sneaking out after dark to dump full boxes
of used Turemo 28 gauge 1/2cc syringes
into the overflowing garbage cans out back
noting similar boxes – similar stories –

(we’ve all got the same garbage
to take out
it seems)

I was dragged out of there and into a shiny
silver car one day and driven to Pasadena
to stay in a detox unit on someone else’s
dollar. it didn’t work:
but her parents – a doctor and an architect –
had unlimited access to cash
and she said “if we don’t go
“they’ll cut me off and we’re screwed”

so we went – 3 days of prayers
and cleaning toilets and earnest shiny faced
ex-addicts telling me to let go and let god
and when we left I was drunk in 7 hours and high
within 24

I never made it back to the Mark Twain:
just other motels – other bad scenes –
years dragging by measured in balloons of
smack and wraps of cocaine

but I visit there often
late at night, drunk,
when I catch sight of myself in
the mirror
looking too healthy, too
smug; self-satisfied,
content.

Mar. 2006