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.
