Bullets For Brains

A tribute to all the great film noirs and hard-boiled novels of the past.

Billy Badass clicked with Roxy B. Kool
While at large from a clip in the pen.
Two kindred grifters, high up on the ball.
Primed for free lunch or a winner-take-all.
Hip to Martino and rollin’ to win.
Damned if they’d die someone’s fool.

R.B. was a chippie with one sexy mouth--
A hooker with axes to grind, crushed out
From the Big House in faraway Yuma.
Dark cheaters hid peepers as green as mazuma.
Emerald portals to her break-away mind,
Hiding clues that her conk had gone south.

Billy was morbid and packed a mean punch.
A palooka who’d wax you for pie.
With a dingus for drillin’, since friends all stepped off,
And a hard-on of cold steel that dipped to no boss.
A three-spot in Sing Sing had loosened his tie,
And he craved eating coppers for lunch.

Together, they danced to a devilish tune.
Trippin’ on ponies and crappin’ the dice
Left them nothing but sawbucks and fins;
And that went for gators and snazzy sharkskins.
Beat down on their nut since their keisters hit ice.
Born wild ‘neath a bloody, red moon.

Roxy and Billy Badass crabbed a con.
The gink sported glad rags and geetus to burn.
A pension for bims left the sucker wide open.
Roxy shed sparks, like the pigeon was hopin’.
The flim-flam went cherry with ducksoup returns,
And cleaned up the croaker. The sweet game was on.

Hopheads in the flophouse kept rippin’ and runnin’.
Hoods sprung from hoosegows cribbed just up the hall.
Twenty- three large was the scratch they ran after.
Eightballs and mickeys came fast, and went faster.
A little chin music set the mood for the ball.
They were hittin’ on eight, and still comin’.

 

The bug joint was jumpin’, the jujus red hot.

The mark became hostile and stone jingle-brained.
A shiv to the pipes left a bleak “Harlem sunset”.
The kind of red morning one never forgets.
The rug they’d been cutting was soon crimson stained,
And seeped in their souls on the spot.

The big sleep was final; it was stand pat or fly.
A rattler was laying. Their bunco imploded.
A clean sneak was vital. No time for vacation.
The skip out was silk as they breezed to the station,
Where buttons and badges, with rods locked and loaded,
Lay waiting to scrap hard or die.

Cop gats began squirting hot lead in their path.
Stop sticks shredded gangsta whitewalls to bare rims.
Twin noodles and pans were soon mush in the crate,
And few recall witnessing horror as great
As the scavenging Reaper, so ghoulish and grim,
Sifting shadows from the creepy bloodbath.

Bullets for brains, playing all the wrong angles.
Flipped head-over-heels by a dark, angry spell.
Blipped off in a coffin for droppin’ a ninny.
Given no choice (as if they deserved any)
Between serving in Heaven or ruling in Hell.
What a ditsy, dead-end way to dangle.