In my little town
dogs sleep on the street
and act affronted
when you drive on the bed.

My little town allocates resources
in proportion to priorities.
We have one school
two churches
and three bars.

The teenage boys in my little town
gather by the pond after dark
with big engines and little cans of beer.
They steal the Stop sign, stone the streetlight,
moon a passing car.
But at least
we know where they are.

In my little town some girls keep horses
in their back yards. Above the dogs and surly boys,
they cruise on saddles astride a big beast,
dropping opinions as they meet.

On the Fourth of July
the whole little town
has a big picnic.

The ducks on the pond in my little town
waddle across the road each afternoon
a milling, quackling crowd
round the door of the yellow house
where the lady gives them grain.
When it rains,
they swim on the road
or sleep there, like dogs.

On a cold morning
the woodsmoke of stoves
lingers like fog
in my little town.

We hold village meetings
where a hundred-odd cranks and dreamers
***** for a grudging consensus.

We cling to the side of our mountain
building homes, making babies
beneath trees of awesome height.
We work too hard, play too rough,
and sense daily something sweet about living
in our little town.

I remember the day we left Southern California,
Dad hurried as fast as he could
While he loaded the moving truck.
Seven hours later
We arrived in a town I couldn't pronounce
To this day I'm not sure if either of us can say it right...

I remember our new house
It arrived several hours after we did on the back of a flatbed truck
I remember the front door swinging open and slamming shut
As the truck rolled over the curb and across the yard
The house was long like a shotgun
And left us bruised

I can remember the time I ran away.
Do you remember what Dad said to me?
"If you don't want to be a part of this family,
You can sleep in the garage!"
That night I wet the bed [sleeping bag]
I remember waking up feeling cold and
Hiding myself so he couldn't see

Can you remember the days when Uncle Al rolled his tobacco
And Aunt Beulah snipped roses in diagonals?
You loved being in their flower boutique
More than I did; You hated the smoke though
But now you can't quit

Do you remember when Chris came home
Covered in blood and tried not to cry?
I do; you were to young
He said they did it because he was 'different'
I remember feeling scared.
If he could bleed like that
Anyone could, especially you

I remember that time we rode our bikes
To go fishing in the pond but never found it
We swam in the river instead and hid in the reeds
I can still smell the lilac flowers that peppered the bank.
I remember thinking how water always runs downhill
But never understood how close we were

I remember when the house burnt down.
I can smell the smoke and feel the heat
You warned me, but I didn't believe you
I just wanted to finish watching TV
I believed you when we stood on the street and watched as
Our long white house burned at one end
Like one of Al's cigarettes

I remember when Dad rebuilt the house
We never saw him
It looked the same on the outside
But the inside was different
Then he got sick
He looked the same on the outside
But his insides were deficient

I remember the back porch
Do you remember when we walked all the way
From the back porch to the highway?
It seemed so far away
We watched the cars as they passed us
I remember wishing so badly that I could go with them
Even if that meant
Leaving you behind

Small town life is simple.
The downtown has no neon.
The streets are long and open.
Begging for the smell of thrashed rubber
And cigarette smoke.

Your mechanic knows your blood type
Your doctor knows your license plate.
Secrecy sounds more like something from a Bond film
Than a genuine principle.

A playground lies across from a cemetery
As though to say no one ever really dies,
Or that it was fun while it lasted.

in the small town land marked by it's single gas station,
teens skateboard through
the Walmart 15 minutes away
smoke cigarettes
in the baseball field of their high school rival
spend Friday nights at waffle house
after football games
the hospital near Walmart
is being closed down
history replaced by
churches and banks
patriotism and school pride
is sewn into the school
t-shirts
a memorial for the boys
who drove drunk and died
it's a community
built on family values,
everyone recounts their
blessings and after years
of collective prayer
He even
bestowed upon that town
a Dollar General

Tangley Wangling

Fruit Jews in Tutus at youth group, maybe just a few with their screws loose. One self-rolling righteous group, their brothers grinning
Within the depths of their white-heads at the brim of a wet blanket suckling the needles catering new drug use. Two by two, elefants and woozels, hippopotamü's confusals, spongey-butts outfitting the rye n' wines refusals.

The luxury of a coccyx felt from the fingers turn to sunrise, where the water's weigh the bricks of suicides, concrete block tourniquets from the migraines of English turnabouts. So there's some surplus of surprise in them, in an integers shock-appraisal face-lift on Catholicism's lobotomy to cuckhold housewives seeking collagen, or the thick dark-skinned forearm-******* insider's swinging in the houses of the denizens, or repurposing their malign from their unused vaginas, to **** the dust off such scab-covered stitches, which is like vacuuming between the loose inner-leg space of a succubus.

Bring out the gimp! Any fetishized leather-wearing hungry miner for the oral tongue-slapping mouth-dance might do, as long as the dom can subdue that sub tied to the stocks voted on for the public to use, there might be screaming, squirming, and scoffs, but there's nothing left for him that Marina Abramowicz hasn't already proven she's willing to lose. Plus, in this small town not far enough from Laramie, there's still too much fat to chew through, too much flab to tuck the **** into, where even the F.U.P.A. so deep that a *******-day or deity might need the leverage of a boot to get even Ron Jeremy's **** unglued.

Lucky loos by the brothel befit these new arrivals, though some tyrannosaurs despise 'em, smoke as much as you can if you've got 'em.

But don't let your antiques get you down, an ornithologist lends herself to your bookends, and even that nighthawk roosting makes your car alarm sound second rate, it's seconds late as the aves rave to the ravens, and they pontificate. Owls hoo-hoo and hooting, branch off with the others and start colluding. They just wanna get you home, to get back those prosthetics you've loaned.

Canoodling barbarians on their way back from the aquarium, demand  their fires come from oblivion, which sends sparks of arguments from the sharks and the bathylkopian oblivions, where we found that this water's warm these citizens, demand recompense for such grandiose living expense, three pence to use the phone, twelve rupees towards the sofa, and even a deutsch mark for every sit or every look at sit, it's just a chair, a doubly set of wooden legs, idling under a table plank. Pirated by the buttocks, such bullocks it is, and that's just it!

An archaeologist on assignment discovered that the future of the rhinoceros exists upon the olfactory exaggerated proboscis, the result of flushing unused anti-biotics, and is currently working for dimes out of college to deluge this quite deprived yet interesting biopic.  

The films of the *****, grab at the ***** thrown about by The Monkees, and the musicians wearing those stickers on their *******, are victim to XXS cotton denim vests, unzipped and barely covering themselves, added to by the accessories and rings, jewelry if anything, a pearl necklace and nubile sacrifis.

And the trollops frolic, diurnally dispose of logic, doing the hoopty-hoop, the alley-oops, with mom's high school flute in nothing but cowboy boots!

These are, the new discoveries of our species, carved into the marble and wet frescos, in the street reliefs, spray-painted and air-brushed motif, this creates such gatherings for throngs of people who've unachieved their needs, who've displaced their parents and display their racist grieving beliefs to trash indigenous language pleas for francophonian linguistic greed that have splayed their hellacious treaty in what's considered to be modern circumscribed and ill-painted cuneiform visually conceived, vocal graffiti.

So that the neu-faux derogatory delegates stress to sudatorium, it has regressed to moratoriums, we've now cancelled this sport consortium of awful and flagrant art performances.

This is the place I’m supposed to call home
Then why do I feel so foreign here?
Like a first time tourist lost within a country where no one speaks English


Yet, at the same time
I see the same faces
the same places
The menu at the diner around the corner never changes
The streetlights come on at the same time each day without fail,
except for that one down the street that’s been out since before I can remember
Never changing, always stagnant
Like an iPod stuck repeating the same bubblegum,
boy band
pop song from 2004


And I feel my stomach turn
my face turns green
my temperature rises
I am sick
of this place
I am tired
of this place
I am sick and tired of whitewashed, backwards thinking of “I’ll take care of myself -
***** anybody else.”
Because this might be a town
but it is anything but a community


And one day
hopefully soon
I will escape the invisible bars that trace the outline of this town
that are continually getting smaller and smaller
as my dreams become bigger and bigger


I can no longer breathe