Tonight's Poet Corner: The Bad Street
The Bad Street by Belinda Roddie On the corner, you'll see the storyteller; he writhes as if Athena's knowledge is bursting from his loins, like a fountain erected within his swollen groin. The tales he tells are masturbatory at best - the words are strung together like floss jammed between the remains of his teeth, making his gums bleed as he enunciates his pseudo-epiphanies. Next to him, a young woman counts coins in her hand, wearing dirt and grime and sweat like a second overcoat. She is missing three fingers. The first she lost because of her ex-husband, when he swung at her with the knife he was using to slice open his feelings. The other two were crushed under the wheel of a sheriff's car, the man in blue unceremoniously leaving the hot rubber to scald her while she was sleeping on the curb. She still makes good use of the remaining middle finger, though - it makes a pretty bird that flaps its wings above the urban dec