Charles Michael Craven is a 23 year-old with many problems, one being writing. He occasionally falls asleep in a town outside of Austin, Texas. Usually, he can be found indoors, wearing a t-shirt, mesh shorts, and a smirk. He has been published in magazines such as Boston Literary Magazine, Churches, Children, and Daddies, The Common Line Project, and Speed Poet. Also has a Chapbook available at scars.tv He also has a popular blog at cmcraven.blogspot.com if anyone would like to read more.

the Nod

sober in a world
full of drugs
because my address book
contains all the dry numbers.

if the government would make it legal
I’d go to Wal-mart
or H-E-B
or a local gas station
and boost the economy.

but because the judges
and the jailers
and the and the county clerks
would be unemployed
I walk up and down a sleeping sidewalk
looking for a fix provided by the broken people.

I hear the early 90’s were better,
opium everywhere,
for everybody,
no questions asked
but at that time
I was still swinging on the playground
and wasting quarters at the video arcade.

now I see the playgrounds and the video arcades
but along the way they stopped being enough.

now it comes in a bag
and with a lighter
and a spoon
and a dropper in my pocket
I’m left as a street soldier carrying a gun
with no bullets for protection.




Fuck an English Degree

you can become a writer too;
just suffer through
a miserable relationship
alcohol or drug problems (an addictive personality is great)
learn to spend torturous nights alone and
hate normal people
normal thoughts
and normal happiness
deal with more substance abuse
maybe a near death experience
and then find real love out of nowhere (but fight it with everything you have).

after all that
pick up a pen
and jot down each emotion
that pours onto the paper.

you are now a writer,
just know
it sucks ass.

Just me, the janitor, and a few Crickets

this poem right here
could cost me a job
but fuck it,
fuck them,
the words will last
much longer than their blindness.

if I didn’t write them down
the words would pour out of me
on top of a college tower
onto unsuspecting and unforgiving
innocent students attending their three o’clock lecture.

I try not to write about drug use
or alcohol abuse
or strippers turned girlfriends turned prostitutes
but I’m just a man
jotting down the stimuli carried to my frontal lobe
in a simple way
in a simple world
full of simple men
and simple pleasures
paid for by complicated currency
created for those that strayed from the flock.

where is God?
where are you?
where is the next bottle
that will make the first two questions obsolete?

all lost.

and the prospect of sleep
scares me sober
and I search for glue
for paint
for resin
but they all laugh
and sing together,

“Sober, Sober, S O B E R
deal with it,
grow UP,
it has to be time
you useless pile of Tuesday’s garbage.”

and with a smirk
even the Devil would laugh at
I find some pain killers
in an ex-girlfriend’s prescription bottle,
pop the top
and swallow
with the dirty enthusiasm
of a $10 whore
at 4:15 a.m.