If I could I would
If I could I would
says the most
sedimentary broken record
and my record player is
broken

someone tore the
chord out in the back
like someone tore the
piece out of your heart
and took too much Hope
from this little light of mine.
Hope is what is left
when he tells you he doesn't
love you anymore.
Hope is the smell of a campfire
on the coat you let me
borrow.
Hope kept me warm and
it will keep you warm
when you least expect it.

it's a namesake, not a joke
don't forget it

Hope doesn't live in Graceland
or in Ianville or in Joetown
but in your precious, little broken heart.

bird's wings will heal and so will you, Hope.

The flowers between our yards
were bleeding pink from their white petals

as if the pink were dripping onto the
dry leaves under my feet

when I plucked one out to remember you.
I told Brother-man it must have been

the most beautiful color I had ever seen.
Surely this has to be a joke,

you, God and his paintbrushes must have
hurriedly whipped up something in the dark

when I was up watching shows about
husbands and fathers who ****.

Then I spilled my tea in your chair
on Christmas Eve. How appropriate.

I even let out a yelp, not uncommon
for you, you dear, sweet old woman

who couldn't hear her own thoughts,
too stubborn to hear the thoughts of others

but always willing to listen.

When lightning has struck me
eighty-two times
I want to hear everything
and on the eighty-third
hear nothing but
the most precious of memories.

I hope I can recount stories
of our embarrassing proposal
and the angry Presbyterian ministers
performing the ceremony

because in twenty-two and a half
years I have never once believed
my grandparents loved each other,
but last night the second Julian
recounted he and Lavern's saga
of a marriage that ended in
four ****-ups and decades of
disappointment
with the most agreeable disposition-
even for a man dying
of too much salt in his diet.

I only hope someone will love me
enough to eat bland food
and our grandson's vegetables one day.

You can sleep at night.
I have to take tranquilizers
to stay asleep and
I'm not the one
proclaiming to be
"The Jerry Sandusky"
of the correctional facility

and I can't sleep at night.

Lately I toss and turn
thinking about the
deafening silence
after a single shot
and the dogs
left in the house to
clean up the blood
before anyone else
finds him.

Congratulations,
that you are happy with
yourself.
Congratulations,
that you are comfortable
in your
pederastic, putrid
wrinkled and washed up
skin.
Mine is white and soft,
and I can't stand
to be in it on
Mondays, Tuesdays,
Wednesday, Thursdays
and Saturdays
because half of that skin
is your skin, your brain
but
like I said,
congratulations that
you've declared your
noble head
"Grown Up" at 60, old man.

Here it comes again
the water moccasin my mother shot
when I was playing in the lake
has come back to bite me in the ***.
She stands, there, in the photograph
she had framed to sit on a table
between two big, uncomfortable chairs

my brother in boots on the wrong foot
Maggie, precious little bird, was even
too young to have to wear a shirt
in this picture

and there in my mother's fingers
dangling feet away from my
warm, little body
was a five foot snake
who still wiggled a little
when his nerves
kicked in.

When we dance to no
music the freckles on the
backs of our hands match.

So goes love. That's how
you know the scales are balanced.
Come back now, you hear?

She drove from one coast to the other
with her contemptible co-Captain, Kenny.
One time in Colorado,
she saw Bambi looking for
berries in the dark
on a concrete highway-
stupid thing-
and all of a sudden

she felt a bump in the road
and kept ******* driving!

Kenny was passed out drunk on ***
in the cab of the ship
like the piece of slimy ****
he is,
and he didn't want to stop until
he could find some more heroine
by God.

A few days later at some half-star hotel
they smelled something rotten under
the front of their tag-teamed semi

and there was Bambi
with two x's for eyes
and his tongue sticking out
like the joke he became
to two pirates looking for
treasure, or pills and tequila
in this case.