follow-up to poker haiku

so, after plugging away for some time i managed to dig myself out of the bad beat mire to make...are you ready?...drum roll please...30 cents!

"congratulations lee! you've grinded your way through a field of hundreds! what are you going to do with the money?!"

"well, chip! it's tough. i'm deciding between a bag of 25 vitners cheeze kurls or a postage stamp."

"well, lee. we're very proud of you and can't wait to have you back to be the object of every donkey's suck-out."

"i can't wait either, chip! i can't fucking wait!"

poker haiku written on a very bad day

Wake up with aces

go to bed with dick in hand

and the cable bill

© 2008 Lee Kitzis

Post-Thanksgiving Poem

A paycheck short

The Hustler’s on T.V.

I pour a martini

too tired to shave

5 hours ‘til work

I make tomorrows spaghetti

it is November 28, 2008

the turkey is gone

I will be thankful if my paycheck gets here
before the rent check gets cashed

there is a slice of pie

I won $2.95 in poker today

I’m thankful for that

4 hours 30 minutes ‘til work

sleep

Tomorrow’s November 29, 2008

I’ll watch the History Channel

and toss cranberry sauce off the balcony

because the holidays are the holidays

celebrity deaths
socks
and slush

Some people run into each other
then it’s over

like rush hour

like this poem

© 2008 Lee Kitzis

snot n' haiku stuffins

Sorry 'bout the hiatus folks. You'll be happy to know I have my own internet connection now. No more masturbating at the window for this guy!
Lessee, what's new. Have a murderous cold. As a result, on just a few hours of sleep. Kids coughing in my face all day long will do that.
Me and Kid Douche went to the Horseshoe on Sunday. It's relatively new but it is in the Hammond, Indiana area. So give it a year til it looks like shit. My only real complaint is that everything's on one floor and the poker room is all the way in the back. So you have to walk through an abyss of slot sleeze and ugly cocktail waitresses before you make it there. The poker room was nice though. Tall ceilings and done up in an old-west motif.
Played the 3/6 limit game and finished ahead about 15 bucks. Which means after the rake and tips I broke even. Yay. But hey, that's casino poker.
Keeping with the haiku theme, here're two of my faves:

Even at the time
When my father lay dying
I still kept farting.

-Yamazaki Sokan (1464-1552)

My span of years
Today appears
A morning-glory's hour.

-Arkida Moritake (1472-1549)

Your sickly Jew -Lee

Poem Written in Between Playoff Games

This old Chinese lady
about four-foot-eight
kept nudging her elbow into me on the train

You have to jiggle the handle just right on our toilet
to get it to stop running
I call it the “fairy jiggle”
very lightly

Ryan Howard has struck out 199 times this season
he is also one of the ugliest men in baseball
a black Mickey Morandini

Mickey Appleman is a professional poker player
hailing from the Mayfair Club days
a mad statistician and teacher with an MBA
Howard Lederer currently holds a two-to-one chip lead over him

I fairy jiggle the handle and think
of the weather in Prague
and a dry martini

A piece of shit floats back to the top
and I think of the Cubs
and that old Chinese lady

I flush again

You can’t wine ‘em all

© 2008 Lee Kitzis

My Family

We’re at a Cuban restaurant on North Avenue
my mom is staring at the plantains and commenting
on how much they look like little potato pancakes
and my dad is telling the owner why she needs to charge
a corkage fee so he can bring his own wine
and my brother’s telling me I need to clean my glasses
and we get into an argument about the Hawaiian Punch guy
and my family’s laughing at me cus I remembered him
having antlers on his head and my dad goes “no it was a
porkpie hat” and then my mom and dad start complaining about
my brother needing to find an apartment on campus in
time “I’m gonna say this once and then let it go…”
which my dad says with everything he complains about
repeatedly and then my mom starts in on how she
can’t believe my aunt and uncle took a trip to
Tokyo for a friend’s wedding my aunt and uncle
who have a mansion in Glenview and another somewhere
in Colorado and my dad says “because they can”
and my mom says “but I just don’t get it. I would
never go to an employee’s wedding in Tokyo” and my
dad says “well they’re friends” and my mom goes
“well I still don’t get it” and my dad goes “well I
guess that’s just one of life’s great mysteries”
but my mom says she still doesn’t get it
and my dad closes his eyes and breathes deeply
and we go and my mom makes my brother
straighten the blinds each one individually so they’re
all perfectly even and I ask “why is she making you
do that?” and my brother goes “because she’s fucking crazy”
and my dad makes my brother and I haul a hundred-pound
disassembled wine rack downstairs and he’s too tired to
take me home so my brother takes me home and we talk
the whole ride there about poker and getting laid
in college and he drops me off I go in crack open
a bottle of whiskey take a stiff shot and write this poem

© 2008 Lee Kitzis

Poetry and Poker

While smokestacks fart in Hammond, Indiana

a gambler gets busted on the nut flush

Looking at my typewriter
with dust-bunnies in its crevices
a busted M key
a missing =+ key
she’s been good to me

so I try anyway

it’ll get me more broke than laid

He buys in for another hand

be good to me he begs

while the old black men in fedoras
the Chinese ATMs
the old Jewish pros
the Italian contractors

people from all over the map

wait for their table

The good ones know

you gotta wait for it

The bad ones
force it

and get something like this

© 2008 Lee Kitzis

Unemployment

I’m applying to jobs everyday
bullshit applications
just so I can collect a government check

one was to Wal-Mart
and another was to a Red Lobster in the ghetto

People suggest things to me

I should be an editor

or a barista

Starbucks they tell me
has great benefits

but I’d much rather play internet poker
in cum-stained lounging sweats

thinking of creative ways
to pay for my health insurance

because it’s eight degrees outside

and every job is the same

I apply to a hardware store
and a shitty Contemporary American restaurant chain
where they call the bosses “coaches”
and the hourly employees “champs”

and if any of these employers
calls me back

I’ll tell them

I’m in the middle of a hand

and hang up

and it’ll be

our little secret

© 2008 Lee Kitzis

New Employee Orientation or How I Came to Hate the Name Heather

The meeting for new employees was in the Columbian Room of the Museum of Science and Industry

A sexless conference area that would make the perfect place for a clerk or receptionists suicide

Tapioca walls and a dirty brown floral carpet

There was coffee and it counted as work
so even after staying up all night drinking Evan Williams
and watching a Chapelle’s Show marathon I went

I was the only one from the Omnimax theatre section of the museum
my usual crowd of cynical college kids and single moms and dads that had it tough but still smiled

The crowd for the orientation was comprised almost entirely of members of the facilitators section which meant they were all bad actors and closet-sized theatre directors that needed a day job

There is nothing worse on this planet than being hung-over and stuck in a conference room full of actors

The overflamboyant noise did not mix well with the sterile atmosphere and it made my headache worse

The speakers took turns talking about payroll and fire-exit safety as if the Gods were listening

after four hours of presentations
it was time for the scavenger hunt

we divided up into groups and were all given packets with 25 fill-in-the-blank questions dealing with the museum exhibits

First one back with all the questions answered got a food voucher good for one cafeteria meal

As my group walked by the El exhibit I had visions of throwing myself on the tracks and being run over by a ghost train

Two women led the group

one was a petite blonde very pretty with a gorgeous ass that looked like it never saw the mattress as she slept and was methodically paraffin waxed every morning

she had short hair and ran ahead with the other girl
an obnoxious redhead who you could tell took everything about acting seriously except the talent part and had visions of that room temperature spaghetti already in her head

I suspected the blonde was just feigning interest as an excuse to stay ahead of the rest of the group as she was creeped out (and rightfully so) by the haggard looking Jew with a five o’ clock shadow the quiet fat guy and the effeminate black guy in a lab coat following her

the ladies shouted out the answers and I pretended to write them down
not wanting to be blamed for costing us our cafeteria coupons

When we returned we had lost by a long shot
and as the actors talked I played cell-phone poker

six hours later and we were barely half-way through the presenters

I got up to go to the washroom and when I came back I could hear maniacal laughter and crying as I approached the conference room door

I opened the door
and it was group activity w/ Heather
Heather was the kind of person that assumed talking loud and being overzealous passed as entertainment simply because it worked on people that went to see Indiana rowboat shows and took their kids to the Dells

while everyone was in a circle role-playing I inched over to the table where I hung my head and tried to remain unnoticed

then Heather led the gang back to the table where she pointed at a screen and yelled some more

after a few minutes of Heather’s blonde amphetamine frenzy she asked everyone to get back up and move back into a circle

one kid finally snapped and threw his glasses against the table

three others moaned

this was more than seven hours later
I had had enough

I asked the HR person leading the group and who’d had enough too if I could go I had a train to catch

he instantly knew that I was full of shit smiled and said yes you can

I hiked out of the conference room and up the stairs
Heather being Heather echoing in the distance

on my way to the train stop I saw the same old disheveled and hunch-backed homeless black guy I see on Cornell and 57th everyday

he looked like he wasn’t getting any change

we would both need some hair of the dog that night

© 2008 Lee Kitzis