UNDERGROUND VOICES MAGAZINE/KEITH NILES


	UNDERGROUND VOICES: POETRY

KEITH NILES

the power

You get to thinking well fuck it I just ain’t going to pay that goddamned power bill
it’s been so long and if they ain’t shut it down by now it may never go down, time
being as infinite as your crazy mind will allow, i got better things to do than deign
to pay their fucking tithe, like play endless games of solitaire and beat back my
email deficits, these power misers, they don’t know who I am--they bring darkness
to me, I’ll bring darkness to them! You get to thinking I ain’t gonna pay the phone
either, I don’t like the phone why should I have to pay for the indignity of getting
talked to death, someone wants to get a hold of me they can wait, or send a
telegram, and this guy at work keeps telling me, look, dupe, you can hook it all up
with your bank, so it all goes thru automatically, look you don’t have to do
anything, it’s easy and I’m like yeah… yeah… you don’t know you don’t trust them
and you don’t for that matter quite trust him or any of it--80 bucks a month for
some gas you hardly use what is that? You’re in denial, you can wait, it needs to
make you hurt when you finally bow to them. And besides you kinda like the
tension and release of it, the not giving a shit til i really musty shit of it, you like
when that last minute instinct hits, and you bolt up at 2 in the a m going o hell o
shit I really need to pay that bill NOW before all that grub in the freezer starts to
thaw and you leap awake and log on and scroll to the page where you do the thing
and search for your fucking passwords and indeed—you’re moments away from
being shut down.. yer just in time, you can probably pull this one out again –but
first a couple more games of solitaire maybe some porn and a little time on
Amazon for comic books… you tease the fucking powerlords, you toy with them,
you get to thinking, you get to thinking fuck it, this is ridiculous, let the power
go down!

keith niles is a poet living in los angeles. his latest collection, the thousand poems vol. 1 (knownothing press), is a distillation of the literally thousands of poems he has written in the last few years as host of the little joy open mic. ottomaton66@hotmail.com