All I Ever Wanted

All I ever wanted was a small measure of happiness to call my own.

I'm not greedy. I'm only asking for my fair share.

Of course, what's fair for one person may not be fair for someone else. The best among us deserve more than the worst. My share should count for more than the bloodsuckers and sociopaths who do nothing but take. I'm a hard worker, so I've earned more than all the lazy people looking for a handout.

If my happiness comes at the expense of all the good-for-nothings in the world, they have only themselves to blame.

The Jigsaw Man

He would have been handsome if it weren’t for the cheeks left pitted by adolescent acne. In what seemed an attempt to distract from the scars, he dressed with obvious expense. He also carried a small black satchel everywhere. There was talk that under another name he had once been a backstreet abortionist or a doctor in a concentration camp. When he died and the satchel was opened, it was found to contain a ski mask such as stickup men wear, a Florida orange, and a book of 105 poems, all of them about the death of the poet’s child.

From Guest Contributor Howie Good

Howie's most recent poetry collection is Gunmetal Sky, available from Thirty West Publishing.