There's something liberating
about watching old men
with gray beards and hats
read intently from thick books
while the world unfolds around them.
Their families are gone,
along with the desire to chase
fast women and fast cash.
These aged men of leisure,
they are the survivors
of war and capitalism,
religion and disease.
Nothing surprises these old men
in their final days of wisdom,
and so, it’s quite simple.
They read in peace.

Calling out dead poets
as sexists or rapists or users
is the opposite of woke enlightenment.
The poet’s job is not to censor
his experiences or his madness
for sanitized comforts.
The poet’s truth is his gift
of insight, a naked wisdom
of hard love and difficult choices.
Narrow fools so often absorb
this sweat and blood poured onto the page.
After their souls are satisfied,
that’s when the fools unsheath
the long sword of ignorance
and ****** the blade square
in the poet’s back.

One day I will die.
I'm reconciled to that truth.
My own death does not concern me.
The teenage boy who knocks on doors
in the rural white neighborhood,
he looks for odd jobs and new friends.
That boy really digs *** and bicycles,
girls, video games, and basketball.
One day, an older resident, propagandized
by cable news and talk radio,
they will call the cops in paralyzed fear,
and then that boy will be wiped
from the face of the Earth.

Indoors on a cold night
two days before the year's end,
a tall glass of whiskey,
and acoustic reinterpretations
of Pink Floyd fills the house.
No human has visited heaven
and returned to describe the afterlife,
but if it's anything like this,
I'm ready to give up the job,
the bills, and the disappointment
for a ride on that cloud.

I've heard feminists say
working class men have too much power.
That kind of naievety was once cute,
but now as working men are criminalized
and gunned down in the streets,
that kind of toxic hatred
has grown dangerous.
The problem isn't that working men
have too much power,
it's that they have no power at all,
and they are slowly being enslaved
in ******* jobs, in prisons,
and in endless financial debts.
Working men have been robbed
of their power, their dignity,
and their ability to care
for the communities
that now decay
in ruins.

A teenage boy sat alone at a picnic bench along the river,
twirling the tip of a pocket knife on the table top.
He then flipped the knife a few inches in the air
and watched as the blade landed and
stuck perfectly straight into a table plank.
A slight smile of satisfaction
pulled across his face.

When the cops came to remove the boy
from society, they found him gently carving
the bark from a fallen tree limb.
He'd planned on crafting a walking stick
for an elderly neighbor.

A week later, after the tears,
after the news coverage,
the half-carved limb remained on the ground,
next to the picnic bench, alone.

The kid with the beard and the ***** apron,
he's just trying to make it.
His shoes have small tears on the sides,
from the way water saturates and weakens the material.
He’s got this way of gliding from table to table,
the same way a dancer owns a stage.
He slides plates of salt-ridden tacos currently in vogue
to a roomful of overfed, undersexed office drones

A woman in a skirt and flip-flops rolls her eyes at a salad.
A ******* in a blazer flicks a ****** under the table.
Still, there's a twinkle in the kid’s eyes,
like he's on the make.
If the right circumstances unfold
he’d snag a loose twenty
from a wallet or a purse.

This is the server's life,
always under the thumb,
hated and stressed,
but always laughing
at the end
of each shift.

I loved you
every single day
especially those nights
you ******
other men
You're better than me
but you kept coming
back for more

All I ever wanted
was to be left alone.
The more I ran,
the faster the cockroaches pursued
with their false friendships
and self-serving greed.

A man grows tired, sagged,
and his body slows,
his mind withers,
as death approaches.
This is not from old age,
but from thousands of stabs
delivered by forked tongues
of friends and enemies,
and his women.

As the spirit escapes
and runs
from the madness,
its the soul which finally
has the last laugh
in the darkness,
alone

That girl
She was the one
who made me laugh
I really dug her
until she stopped loving me
Then I fell in love
with her