Poem For Henry Vaughan

Henry Clay Vaughn
Gunfighter
Outlaw
Falling among exploding shells
Collapsing
Exhausted
Blinders on
Burdened by secret suffering and the weight of a hungry world
Mercy is the seat of power
Henry knows this
And all he wants to do is settle down…
There are waves rolling in his gut
And windfalls
Raging embraces and
Salty spit inside his mouth
This life is for the bold
And the merciless
Henry will never rest again
Watch
How uncomfortably he stands there
Aching with discomfort
And unclean

My name is Christopher Flakus, I am a poet and writer from Houston, Texas. From the get-go I wanted only two things out of this life…to be a poet, and to be an outlaw. I achieved both, though the state of Texas, and most folks really probably only see me as the latter. I write the songs of county jails, of rehabs, of psych wards, of addicts, of wanderers, and of the broken-hearted. I am certainly not the first to write about this life, certainly not the first to have lived it either. I do believe that the outlaw poetry tradition is somewhat being lost…the beatnik jailbird voices of yesterday are being replaced by a cleaner, sterilized, and safe-sounding prose…which is fine, folks will read what they like and that’s just fine. But I continue to write the world I live in, as long as I am living it. I attached a few poems of mine from a short book of poetry I wrote entitled: “Bare Down Into Hell With Me As Only a True Friend Would…” These poems chart my life from heroin addict in 2012, through jail, madness, and into my current state of shaky recovery…

I studied literature at St. Edwards University in Austin, Texas and St. Thomas University in Houston. I have published work in Blackheart Magazine, Glass: A Journal of The Arts, L’Allure De Monts, The Refined Savage Review, and was the co-editor of the punk poetry zine Cracked Mirror Repair. I am a contributor and co-author of several music articles for The Huffington Post.