On natural poisons

The feds came around to bust him back in the day when down was up and up was gone and you were a strange phenomenon on those tangerine

evenings wailing about how fast things can change in the key of D-sharp minor on some saxophone hanging over high wire ledge slinging lo-fi

versions of Charlie Parker and just blowin’ down every straw & stick dream we tried to hold up on those hot dripping evenings when the full moon be

sweating and the stars keep falling out of the sky out of sheer exhaustion and when Sally and her gang meet a ways down underneath and out

beyond city lights with hotrods and benzedrine and weed frenzied races up that dead patch of freeway the county never finished seeing

as the deputy mayor had an affair with his intern and got her preggers right there against the office water cooler and the two of

them — she was no more than 22 and still living with her mother — they emptied the city coffers and vanished in the night for someplace

down in Honduras or Nicaragua or other lost jungle exile where their child would grow up with the sound of howler monkeys tattooed

onto his psyche along with the choking fragrance of the tropical flowers that dripped over every inch of the back garden seeing as

his mother by this point had given up on politics and discovered a green thumb on her left hand while her husband started dipping his

toes into the fabrication of natural poisons and took to hunting deadly snakes and draining scorpions and tarantulas of their

venom; and mixing large vats of this stuff and driving down dusky god forbidden highways at the end of which were always mean looking drug

cartel members eager to unleash these fatal creations on unsuspecting enemies who were last seen sipping tainted margueritas;

or licking postage stamps; or kissing the wrong baby in the street; and suddenly feeling a loss of aural control, a slurring of speech,

a tongue like a gym sock, then a clenching of the jaw, locked and loaded as the poison slipped down throat and froze lungs like frost spreading across a

window so that death arrives before the nasty liquid even landed like daggers in stomach, this poison being all-natural,

organic and locally sourced which seemed to increase its potency by a fair amount so it could almost compete with those corporate

chemical cocktails sprouting out of labs like magic bean jack-in-the-boxes with chemists throwing combinations of compounds into vats to see

what came out: Will it kill plants, or burn a village, or destroy a culture? Or could it get us super hooked and super high? But just as long as it

wreaks havoc with no regard of consequences; that it gets a gold star and advances to the next round of testing which typically

involves getting a shit ton of mice, and a chimpanzee who will one day snap from a particularly high dose of methamphetamine

and rip off his tester’s face.