Playing the Short Stack

For almost a decade I've been joking that I was a better poet twenty years ago than I am now, and I'm not getting any better. Well, it doesn't seem much like a joke anymore, so I had a brainstorm: I have twenty-five years of journals of poems I started, finished and rejected, or just wrote titles I found were amusing sitting around doing nothing. Here's one I found that I'd like to work on here and now. It's titled "Playing the Short Stack," and I wrote it while I was living at the Clayton House Motel, an infamous flop house here in Rockford known for prostitution, drug dealers, and all sorts of villainous scum. Unfortunately, I was only interested in unlimited air conditioning and cable television in my three months there and didn't see any of that. I did eat my first Krispy Kream donut, watch two nights of Monster Fest, and spend my very last dollar before getting another job and leaving that place. This was during the first phase of Texas Hold Em Poker exploding into the American consciousness, and for a while I enjoyed watching it on the television.

This picture shouldn't be here.

Playing The Short Stack

"Your 'All In'
Ain't much of nothin,'
Because you ain't got nothin'
Except a loser's hint
Of a bluff,"
She said,
And I would have
Snapped off something equally
Devastating back but
I couldn't even see her
Behind all those chips. Pin It