February 2008 - Nezafati

I sat at the table trying to drink my Vodka Tonic in peace.

Literary types all around me.

They loved to profess their love for dead men.

"I have a great addiction to Marlowe," the tall useless boy says turning to me suddenly, as I am trying to give tentative glances to the giraffe woman to my left.

She is so big and juicy, I tell myself. A monument of perfect disorder. She looks at me with Groucho Marx mock expression. She might just hate these people as much as I do.

"What do you do?" he asks me as my skin crawls like a charred moth.

"Do you go to school? Work?"

"I am an actor and involved in a Shakespeare Company," he tells me before I can utter a response. What a bag of hollow bones he is. The giraffe woman gets up to leave with ingenious timing. I am left with actor boy trying to look confused and retarded, in the hopes that he will leave me alone.

He doesn't.

A couple of lizard faced girls walk into the scene radiating with self-love and mindless observations.

I am grateful.

They take the attention off me and actor boy now has more prey to inform how brilliant he is.

They exchange all their college class wisdom on the Romantic poets, without ever listening to one another.

I watch dejectedly, as they try to out-joust each other. This is worse than I thought, I quietly think to myself.

Then Big Tim enters the foray, with his rebellious, American, gung-ho attitude. A large gorilla of a man, with ice in his gaze, and thunder in his forearms.

The literary types shudder, their conversation halted.

"Where's the beer at?" he roars despite a gentle smile and easy laughter.

The useless actor shakes his head in haughty dismay.

The lizard girls feign deaf ears, resuming their pageant of posh lifelessness.

"Let's go get some," I say.

Peter Nezafati is a former ballerina, recovering from repressed desires to mate with a couch. Much of the eighties was spent trying to relieve himself of this infirmity, with the application of electric shock treatment, pharmacology, and the application of tweezers on various sexual organs. While walking home one night from an Argentinian bathhouse, he was struck in the head by an avocado. From that point on he was consumed by writing. His poetry speaks from the gall bladder, is brutish at times, but almost always is never romantic, and at best can be described as wholly selfish and savagely prosaic.

But seriously folks, Peter is really just a ruffian writer residing in Laguna Beach, California attending Chapman University in the pursuit of his Masters in English, while teaching and tutoring Undergrad students in the Writing Center. He is looking for a publisher for his collection of short stories, entitled Words to Die By. A collection of poetry is in the works, as well.

Peter is the prideless author of such "epics" as The Barren Field, The Church of Man, and Romantic Reptiles. He also has poetry being published in The Hudson Review of Poetry Digest, Cherry Bleeds, and Poeticdiversity.

Contact Peter
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