Author: Rex Sexton

  • Dead End

    He took the Greyhound to the dying
    town and rented a cheap room near the
    factories – most of which, he found,
    were dead and empty things. He called
    the plant he once worked at, long ago
    before his stint in the army, before his
    discharge sent him back out into the
    world, wandering. It had come to that,
    even though he knew in life there is no
    going back. A long shot at best, he was
    hoping he could connect with someone
    who remembered him from the past.
    Mute point. They weren’t hiring, didn’t
    expect to be, might be down sizing, or
    closing completely, like every other
    place in the vicinity. The same people
    walked the streets – hardscrabble
    working class families. Only no one
    was working and the buildings were
    decaying and all you saw on each face
    was that look of quiet desperation. You
    can’t go home again. You can’t stay
    there either. We are all nomads, now, in
    a no man’s land; not even looking for,
    or expecting to find, our own private
    little Garden of Eden, each day a
    blessing, in which to live our lives.

  • Night Watch


    Out of the black,
    star-domed unknown,
    nothingness rushes in with a scream,
    a shrieking, circular, no more,
    which mangles the jungle night with flames.

    Vietnam and napalm,
    fear death agony destruction
    and all for nothing!

    Slanting forward, I slash the canvas
    with colliding colors, fractured planes,
    splintered perspectives, blood-red rhythms,
    writhing soldiers, twisted trees,
    (gray hair soaked with sweat,
    old clothes splattered with paint)
    a crazy conflagration of distorted shapes,
    which looks like nothing so much
    as a Hieronymus Bosch on hash,
    (or maybe some asylum inmate’s “art therapy” piece)
    destined, when it’s done, for an exhibit at the
    Vietnam Veterans Museum, thinking of Iraq
    as I lash away and of the roadside-bombed soldiers,
    I read about everyday, reassigned to graves …

    “Art tells us the truth about being human.”

    I remember reading in one of my art criticism books.

    So does a bullet.

  • Haunted

    HAUNTED

    From night to day to night again
    the clock’s hands grasp illusions.
    Love knows nothing of time.
    Love knows passion, fever, reaching
    for someone to hold onto forever.
    Like a sorceress, or prankster witch,
    you left your memory in the dark to
    haunt me each night when I turn out
    the lights. I sleep with ghosts, dream
    of you, wake up with shadows.
    What went wrong? Who’s to blame?
    Why does love fade away, when hand
    in hand through good and bad, side by
    side through thick and thin,
    sharing laughter, joy and pain, you
    wake up from a dream and all you
    were died that day?

  • The Big Chill

    The Big Chill

    Days bleak, bitter with winter.
    No heat in their building, night
    coming quickly, Manny’s wife
    stoic, kids colic, “holding money”
    gone with the economy.
    “I prowl streets.” Manny tells me.
    “Ghostly with all these drifts,
    past shut down workshops,
    factories. STOCKS SOAR,
    BANKERS OPTOMISTIC,
    UNEMPLOYMENT FIGURES
    DISAPPOINTING, HOUSES STILL
    FORECLOSING. Tattered newspapers
    flutter down the walks grabbing at
    Manny’s steps like specters haunting
    the Philly sidewalks. I know, I’ve
    been there and when you finally get
    home at the end of each payless day,
    the houses in your working class
    neighborhood, which hasn’t seen
    work since 2008, seem to huddle
    together like headstones in a
    graveyard. I’ve walked those streets
    too. Where every street sign
    seems to read DEATH’S ROW
    instead of Pine, Maple, Elm and
    Oak. And there’s no going back
    to what was before, because it
    isn’t there anymore.

  • House of Blues

    Where there’s plenty of bad news, which the lost girl at the Honky Tonk piano wails about, tearing your heart out, as she sings her tales of a cold and heartless world, amidst the drunken toasts, smary jokes, cigarette smoke, asking what can you do when no one follows the Golden rule?  Or where can you go when you’re down and there’s no way out?  Or when will true love conquer all?  Is there any love in the world at all?

    You sit, drink, try try not to think.  But the lost girl is like the shadow you though you erased when you slipped into this dark place, crying out to your soul everything you needed to escape and don’t want to know.