2 Poems by George Gad Economou

Finally, there’s nothing

I’ve been drunk in many bars,
I’ve gotten high in many dark alleys.

full with hope and dreams when I
drank everyone under the table or when I
went sleepless for a week during wild benders.

now, I’m
dreamless,
empty,
dead within.

penniless, like always,
surrounded by books and empty bourbon bottles.

the soundtrack remains the same, the guffaws of
children from the kindergarten across the street.

sex sounds from the apartment above,
someone’s hitting his wife one block down.

in some alley, someone shoots up junk
and evaporates as if he never existed.

blue smoke rises in front of me,
vanishes, rises again.

the moon is gone,
eaten by the giants.

a god is barbequing in the sun.

I’m sitting here
with my worn-out keyboard
making music for the deaf,
poems for the blind,


philosophy for the dead.


Rage!

rage, rage against the dying of the light,
still looking for the light, still
peeking into every dark corner hoping for a flicker.

can’t feel rage any longer, too
numb to feel,
too tired to keep on looking.

the former havens are
forever gone, nothing is
left standing but the
moonless night of an unforgiving god.

the bawls are heard across
cities and countrysides;
no escape yet still
no rage.

only disappointment,
surrendering,
defeat.
defeat.

the tantrum of the new day.
can you hear them coming? speeding
down like a runaway train driven by
a blind junkie, cocaine the
only required fuel.

monsters swim in oceanic depths, yet
we know more about space than our
own psyche;
we care more about faraway travelers we shall
never meet than the destruction and
desolation in our neighborhoods.

welcome.
and rage.
keep on raging.
forget the light, it’s
dead already.

we have other things to talk about;
like the 19 glasses of whiskey.

vague memories from a bar; we did
talk, didn’t we? I can’t
remember, the only recollection is
the high-pitched scream:
NO, PLEASE NO

and my whispering plea:
don’t call anybody

it’s how it
almost ended; it didn’t.
it’s how it’ll end, although someone else
will be shrieking.

so, here’s the end, my
friend, whom I met for a brief
second when I entered the midst of
nothingness:
rage, rage against the birth of midnight.

Bionote 

Currently residing in Greece, George Gad Economou has a Master’s degree in Philosophy of Science and is the author of Letters to S. (Storylandia), Bourbon Bottles and Broken Beds (Adelaide Books), and Of the Riverside (Anxiety Press). His words have also appeared, amongst other places, in Spillwords Press, Ariel Chart, Cajun Mutt Press, Fixator Press, Outcast Press, The Piker Press, The Edge of Humanity Magazine, The Rye Whiskey Review, and Modern Drunkard Magazine.