trump’s gonna decimate the tourist industry
you think people said
“gee, i wanna visit **** germany
looks like fun”?

i enter unit A-19
the place to be for car accidents, gunplay
and the mayhem people get into
i'm humming que sera sera
get to my space and turn on the radio
baroque sunday
ahhh
now bring on the death and destruction

say you’re exhausted at work
your shoulders are anchors
your eyes are lead
you gotta sleep
but you gotta keep going
no choice
you must stay awake all afternoon
into the evening

now let’s say you’re in bed at last
head on the pillow
blanket on your belly
cat on your knees
you remember the afternoon’s exhaustion
as you melt into sleep

happiness

the function of words is to communicate
not flaunt vocabulary
dazzle with metaphor
or shock with syntax

but then there's poetry

a relentless weekend in the ER

i kid you not
a man fell off the couch
and we had to rush him to the OR
to pry off half his skull
and staunch the bleeding
to keep him alive

we had another fella
6’6 with the biggest head in the universe
probably 400 pounds
he hadn’t bathed in five years
he was a white man and his skin was black
the nurses scrubbed him clean later in the ICU
an epic endeavor
he couldn’t walk
amazingly he had a girlfiend
who shoved him from bed to chair
to toilet and back for years
supplied him with pain meds for years too
the big guy’s in big trouble now
needs a tracheostomy to keep him breathing
but can’t get one because his neck
is as thick as a chimney
and he’s young—35
his mother and sister came up from florida
they hadn’t seen him in ten years
and had no idea how he’d deteriorated

and let’s not forget the uber driver
who had a heart attack while driving
poor woman never made it
out of the trauma bay

now it’s monday
i’m eating a frozen pizza
watching Paris, Texas
Wim Wenders, Sam Shepard
and Harry Dean Stanton all agree
this world
and every world
is tough to navigate

i could brag about my night
but to who?
what sentient being is epicurean enough
to appreciate my palate?
cosmopolitan enough
to follow my exploration?
who has mastered the physics
to dig my trajectory?
there’s only one
back to the mirror!

had a great time in new orleans this year
sad to hear about that brain-dead *******
with an empty life and nothing better to do
than launch his truck into a bourbon street crowd
on new year’s eve
14 dead, dozens crushed
and oooo, he served honorably in afghanistan
and probably had unmet mental needs from the war
and yeah, wonder where this twice-deployed vet
got the bug to slaughter folks he never met?
he was a hardworking family man
he helped out the lady upstairs
all these random mass murderers have a story
and the search for their motivation
is served up to us as entertainment, really
at this point we have to dodge the raindrops
you can't go to the supermarket
without the possibility of assassination
the world is brimming with violence
but this growing american compulsion
for murdering arbitrary strangers
much less executing first graders
seems unprecedented
an especially nasty example
of american exceptionalism