Paying The Rent Poem by James McLain

My woman was gone
and the empty bottles like brown corpses
surrounded me with their uselessness.
The sun was still good, though,
and my landlady’s face a hue formed in some fire and
undemanding in it's yellowness.
What was needed now
was a certain good samaritan,
that can look upon such heart felt pain.
Most pain of this nature is absurd.
Absurd because it exists, nothing more.
l shaved hastily with an old rusty razor
the man who had once been young and
no longer was to have said.
I used to have a certain genius.
Now that the final act has played out in some play.
That’s the tragedy of all the new youth.
At the edge of death and the dead.
And as I walked into the dark hall.
Where the landlady stood
smelling of age and mothballs.
Shreaking her voice and so final,
sending me again back to the well.
Waving her fat, hairy arms
and screaming at me for the rent.
All because the world had failed us
miserably both.
And now feeling like her defeated.
I finished off the bottle and killed her.