You laugh
but the tee shirt’s true
hard to fly like an eagle
when you work with turkeys.
And we work
all day stoopin’
for cabbages.
I hate the smell of the stuff,
The fields of it,
tubs of sauerkraut brewing
in the farmer’s house.
I’d eat some meat instead.
They give us the stuff for free.
Keep it I say.
I’ve had my fill
of cabbages,
no money in it.
Work is all.
They got to get it in
before the season change—
before we move
south again.

Sometimes I wonder if I should
go back to drinking.
Wash it all away.
Write better,
fuck better,
reunite with a good
strong cry.
A good
clean cough.
Start it all over again.
Having life come over me like a
beautiful morning hangover. 
A glorious eviction notice.
Tilting my fisherman’s cap,
adjusting my
black rimmed glasses.
Spitting and pissing over the
whines and moans.
Freeing myself one more time.
Just once more I say.
I'm a magnificent
son of a bitch.

When sweet living
is at last
depleted,
And I've assumed
the all mortal
woe,
My only prayer,
I'll not die
defeated,
By all the things
I could never
know.

I am supposed to believe
that the world is only
6 or 10 thousand years old
and that I, and you,
are descended from two single people.
And these two people are the parents
of the world,
which seems to mean,
no matter how distant and diluted,
I am related to my wife
by blood,
and that is a concept
I’d rather not entertain.
 
I am also meant
to believe,
whole heartedly,
that the dinosaurs did not exist,
nor does evolution,
and I was created by God
in his very own image..
 
I am a creation of God,
shaped by his own hand!
I,
as I sit here writing this,
with my thinning hair
and expanding waistline
and the chemical imbalance
that sometimes splinters my mind
so fiercely, completely,
it takes me months to recover.
 
I do not even want to think about
the appendix, upside down
eyeballs or the thousand
needlessly complex things
that keep my body
moving.
 
Of course,
I can understand
why
some people
prefer to believe the world
is so young.
It is much easier
to feel less insignificant
in a world
of 6 or 10 thousand years
than in one
that has forever been revolving
for billions of years..
 
But I think
I
would rather be a nothing
striving to be a something
in the stretch of eternity
than a purposely flawed man
in a world overripe
with failures.

use to
exit
highway 99
fade
right
quick park
and
have this
frizzled meth head
shake
my dick
while i
sat
on her
lap