I was born in a five dollar room to the sound of jazz and in the smell of rye whiskey.  I was the consequence of a twenty dollar romance  between a sad, broken woman and a rich, unknown man.  The woman named me Santino and the man was long gone by the time I came.

She died in the streets.  Bad heroin in her veins, I presumed.  I survived, a child growing up in the alleys on the backdoor steps of bars and pawn shops -there with the discards of lives that once were and the dreams that never came to be.

I am three times my age, an old man worn out by cold and neglect.  I am a ghost of a soul, a dweller in the shadows and resident of the sewers.

So I drink my muscatel and chew on half-eaten rolls, here on the corner of Third and Lombardy, beneath the gaze of neon dragons.

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the neon dragons glare down on me,
with eyes of fierce and mystic antipathy,
etching scars of cobalt blue and Chinese red,
across my face, across my soul, across my sidewalk bed,
to sleep this night on streets of winter cold,
with nightmare fears, dark and old,
a drunken heartbreak, lost and sold.

updated Jan 16 '10 by TheRiverTalker