The Best Ones Are the Crazy Ones
by Stephen J. Golds
I’ve tried to love the good women.
The kind who talk about their day
with a vacant smile on their perfect lips,
who cook me delicious healthy
dinners and enjoy watching soap operas, while
resting their head on my shoulder.
The women who answer questions frankly,
honestly when I ask them.
Women who make me
feel content and confident.
But I always find myself going
back to the kind of women
who disappear some nights,
their phones switched off.
The type of women who will text me
the sexiest photographs when we’re apart
and then send them to others
when I’m in the shower.
Or the women who lie about
what they ate for lunch, who they met yesterday afternoon
and the men who are messaging them
while they are in bed naked with me.
The women who fake birth control or
are sleeping with me because
they’re still angry with their ex-boyfriends
or their absent fathers.
The kinds of women who cheat with me and
then later cheat on me. The ones I have to warn
that they’re making a scene and
then they try and slap me, miss and
knock things that smash onto the floor.
That run off into the night threatening
to throw themselves off a bridge or
threatening to call the cops or both.
Or worse. The kind of woman,
I know, that’ll see me swing from
the end of a rope one day and
smile a little.
I could say I love
these kinds of women
because I just
can’t love myself. Maybe there
is some truth in
that
but maybe it is
they’re just a
euphoric kind of self-harm
that I inflict on
the ragged soul
instead of on the
flesh.
“The Best Ones Are the Crazy Ones” originally
appeared in the
October 2020 print issue of Chronogram Magazine.
Stephen J. Golds was born in London, UK, but has
lived in Japan for most of his adult life. He enjoys spending time with his
daughters, reading books, traveling, boxing, and listening to old Soul LPs. His
novels are Say Goodbye When I’m Gone (Red Dog Press), Always
the Dead (Close to the Bone) Poems for Ghosts in Empty Tenement Windows,
and the forthcoming collection Love Like Bleeding Out With an Empty Gun in
Your Hand.
Cindy
Rosmus is a Jersey
girl who looks like a Mob Wife & talks like Anybody’s from West Side
Story. She works out 5-6 days a week, so needs no excuse to drink or do
whatever the hell she wants She’s been published in the usual places, such as Shotgun
Honey, Hardboiled, A Twist of Noir, Megazine, Beat to a Pulp, Out
of the Gutter, Mysterical-E, and Rock and a Hard Place. She
is the editor/art director of the ezine, Yellow Mama. She’s a Gemini, a
Christian, and an animal rights activist. She has recently been branching out
into photo illustration, under the guidance and mentoring of Ann Marie Rhiel.
