Macrame for days
cruising in tubes
and fannypacks
on Caddy couches

Ash in Pepsi cans
dogs n mac
and
floral print velour
meant love

A onetwo on
Soda Popinsky
and locust
husks
on the old
walnut tree
were the
****

New Topps
new Jos
new Raisins
air conditioning
and the smell of the
rain

I could have
but didn't
I don't know why
I certainly should have
but I didn't even try
maybe
someday
I'll get around to that thing
someday
but not today
or tomorrow
perhaps not ever

**** it
I suppose

why not live the lie
and regret it
until the day I die

Shower beer
shower beer
my kingdom for
a shower beer

My kingdom is
a shower and a bed
yup
just a shower and a bed
in this
podunkshitholenowhere
******* town

But I'm suds'n up
while suds'n down
making my frown
turn
up
Up
UP-side down

Nothing better
nothing aside
from her
peachy little mound
nothing better in this
fuckedupdownandoutdingy
******* Desert town

Never astray
have I been steered
nope
not by a shower beer
no indeed
no tears have I shed
no siree
no life have I bled
no not me
no ill will have I ever bred

no
not on account
of
a shower beer

She dances
a demon's tinder
through a voice
not her own
purring Appalachia
as if born to it

But it's not the voice I hear
I hear how it was

Sounds and sights
twenty years gone
on those streets
on that railing
through those halls
in that cold

She's in other halls now
on other tracks
down other roads
warm and shadowed
by a different
firelight

Did she change
certainly
Did I
doubtful

Maybe
I just never
really knew
her
voice

The Reds won by turning capitalism and democracy against us The frenzied shortsighted pursuit of individualism enraptured by its own grandiosity Obese in arrogance and false piety Among our weakest links the myth of liberty in the guise of protection against our own From My Cold Dead Hands they will eulogize the depths of our hypocrisies tucked into the gaping cracks of a marbled column tombstone that reads We the People a hollow echo from a dead philosophers guilded mirror reflecting delusions of equality while his window glimpsed the reality of People bound as chattle An era of monsters championed as heritage by a devolved theater of gross absurdity enraptured by a sycophantic maelstrom swirling a wretched mass of vitriolic grievance creeping its facists tendrils through our halls our homes and our hearts So much bluster about essential freedoms now a **** in the wind from a constituency of the ignorant dead eyed before the altar of Exceptionalism A manifestion of the truly unexceptional by a bizarre cult of personality devoid of that very essence Whiny and bloated convinced its oily opulence is somehow self evident justification for its own cavernous gluttony Heavy the privileged jowels spew hatred and lies slathered in corruption shouted as truth through the arcanity of scripture among those who would not know the forest from the trees from the rot in their minds as long as it says so on the TV vomiting endless propaganda of imagined shadow forces flooding the country with fictionalized caramel colored criminals Willingly blind barrelling into a fog of twisted fantasy failing to realize that the narcos envisioned pale by comparison of heinous intention or deed to the very real NARCs embraced Lockstep and jackboot heel in toe behind a tide of Nationalism that is anything but A contrived patriotism cannibalizing its own mythology whittling the bones of history to alternate facts devoured by fat children as so much sugary cereal bored reading the Constitution from the back of a whitewashed cardboard box ******* about a return to values and integrity they never possessed with their fingers crossed Cowing to the blackened whims of spineless parasitic wraiths picking at the shades of fallen titans Packs of roving dipshits trumpeting ideals their grandfathers died to eradicate Prancing about sporting the finest camo and tac gear in a perverse sashay Their measure of civic duty reduced to how much red white and blue crowds their shitstained boxers dowsed in cheap beer and sad rivulets of encrusted ***** trickled in a shame for which they have yet to fully account or atone Fools leading the foolish to oblivion are we God bless the USA for surely no creature under heaven would

I bought
one of
his first editions

He would
have preferred
that I spent it
at the track

We all disappoint

I hate those Voodoo mornings when I cant dig myself out of my own head a relentless quipping chirping anxiety over woulda coulda shoulda wishing I knew better wondering why I dont silent resolutions that evaporate by days end pondering the infinite insignificance of everything that is nothing paranoid that nothing is in fact everything in the doomed hands of a salvation without mercy heavy hearted in the dark waiting for light to peek through the blinds and tell me that its ok to be awake its a lie but thats ok too I guess **** it might as well make the coffee

BUT

I
love
those
hazy
baked
evenings
where
every
thought
is
clarity
or
at
least
the
perception
of
it
guiding
each
seamlessly
to
the
next
and
still
next
after
until
the
next