Trailer Park Shuffle

What a woman.


28-a
Old Gold
Bush beer,
she sits like
she’s always been here.

Like the tide’s
highest stain
poetry
remains
in a trailer park bathroom,
(way way way out west)
and I wonder
if it is important
I am alive and drinking
(aging and thinking)
?

Have you heard the blues
comming from somewhere
not yours
and felt
like you could feel comfortable there?
Someone catches your glance
and you walk on.

We are only as cruel
as the cruelty we have withstood
(I have hurt
already broken hearts
and it felt good)
and I wonder
am I already all I am to become?

What a woman.
What a pose.
Maybe she knows
what God knows.
We orbit around her in rapid timelapse
and the lines deepen on her face
her trailer sinks in the dirt
and she hasn’t wasted a moment.









2





Siera is seven
and covered in shit,
smells like sewer
and likes it.

See her strut
like she had a ghetto boody but.
By definition
everbody loves a slut.
She will
what ever she will,
it may sound awful
it’s true still.

Childhood
memories
are ours to hold,
let her have hers
how ever it may unfold.


Siera is seven
and covered in shit,
smells like sewer
and I like it.

Cause if she wern’t here
there’d be no Sieras
in a few years
(maybe fifteen or so).





















It’s as loud as sobs

It’s as loud as sobs.
Colectively the TV’s, frogs, water pumps, are a presence
that hides lover’s arguments.

As loud as sobs
the V8 throbs
and takes someone away.

As lonely as a croud,
(A friend on whom I relied
recently commited suicide)
as suitable as sanity,
(Close your eyes and feel these,
they are this weeks feces)
a trailer park is the space
(clumbsy as the will to write
useless like the urge the fight)

to fail.

Comerce

Mary Alexander threw her beer bottle at Amie Oliander the bar tender.
Although she missed, Amie cried.
The owner arived
and it was decided
Mary could return to drink tomorow.
Amie sulked
the owner noticed
and fired her.
Mary Alexander returned
nothing was learned
and Amie drinks down the street.

I can’t shuffle the deck, my hands shake too much.
Men want to shoot cats,
thats why we invented guns.
Cats want to get fat,
that’s why they invented women.
Dogs want everything all at once,
that’s why they’ll never get it.
Women want men to shoot their cats,
don’t ask me why.
Beer is proud and elegant in it’s bottles
we barely hold on like young timid hookers to erections.
Cats break rules
cause men cant.
Dogs can’t break rules
cause mean cant.
Women make rules
cause men won’t follow them.
Cats sleep in rays of light,
like targets.
Men want to shoot cats.





The problem with prince charming is his armor is welded on
and he cannot fuck you.

And the stoic melodrama of alcoholism goes on and on and on:
I caught the shakes
from thin
women
who taught me not to eat
as
food is a confrontation with basic needs
never
fufiled.

It’s a language of humiliaiton
and 3 a.m. self loathing,
drinking the last light away;
we understand eachother
and pick at the scabs.

I caught the shakes
from a woman who wanted me to prove to her I cared enough to stop her
and as i hoisted her frail
thin
frame into the air
and headed into the night
past the disbelieving tables
of pot smokers
and past the envious
bar stools,
she shoke with a decade on Monarch vodka.
She tried to warm my heart
by pissing on me.




‘Fuck you too,’
he said to no one
or me
or everyone
and no one.
They all had it coming.
No one
is his
kingdom.
A fishpole like a sword
he is
the king of the recession.
Fuck you too
a toast to and from
mighty men.
Alcohol
I recall
got me into this
and it might get me out of this
bad
bad feeling.
So he stinks
and I think
I may too,
so you fuck you too.
Kings of the recession
bid you
a fuck you too.





Fewer Teeth

It’s better the fewer teeth you have
then when
you fall
outside some university
because your lost in thought
angry angry
thought
and everyone sees how poorly you’ve fared over the years
you can brush yourself off
and keep on walking
and not worry about your teeth.






who is old anymore?
if your alive you are obligated to be young
publicly
though there are those
who
publicly
are dead.
Can the dead be old?
Sweat pants are as timeless
as are the cool assholes
being young
and avoiding wal-mart
where the sweat pants are on sale.

The baby boom swath of infants
grining through their gray ponytails
feel
their prepetual youth
entitles them to
prepetual youth.
Ask them what they ate today
if you want to waste the rest of the day.

I say this because
I am quiet and old
and these things may need to be told
should this era otherwise be judged
as all for naught.

I say this because
as much as we all talk
we don’t mean a word of it,
“I hate you.”
So my best friend
went to the ER and told them he had nothing to live for.
He signed a consent form.
They gave him pills and a bed
for a while.
He got out
and the pills wore off
and he was broke
so he went back in.
This time they gave him more pills
and he made a collage about his feelings
in an art therapy class
which he consented to pay 250 dollars an hour for.
After he got out and the pills wore off
he realized he had nothing to live for.
He tried telling them the ‘bed pill art class’ thing wasn’t working
but they said he wasn’t qualified to say that.
He did the bed pill art class thing again,
got out and got a medical bill for two hundred and fifty thousand dollars.
“Man,” he said. “I have nothing to live for,” he said.
“Before I was just sad, “now I am in debt for the rest of my life,”
so this is what he does.
This is why he’s my best friend too, listen to this you’ll like it:
he takes his last twenty to the bar and hits a few flushes on video poker,
meets up with some of the strippers he met at AA
bought some crack
drew with the crayons they give you at Denys and drank coffee with the strippers all night
and woke up the next morning feeling really bad but ahead fourty bucks.
art is a whore
whoes atracted to money
it’s a kind of comedy at best...
(the laugh track is my waves of intoxication)
have you seen Bosh’s hell?
I will die wearing my boots working for the nursing home my parents mortaged their house
to die in.

I’ve seen my kids generation
un-aborted
waiting
faces lit by computer screens
born tired
dying wired
sitting with their legs crossed
on raw filthy pavement
waiting
for busses, rides, tow trucks, fathers, mothers, aunts.
Unprecident prosperity is a bitch.





Let this recession wash over us all.

Downstairs in thebar we know the smoking ban is comming.

Let poverty rise like the tide
and flush out the crap we’ve made
like a deep sigh.

My god look at them worry
and ignore our glory,
booze.

So I sat for what seemed like minutes
or years
rambling over cheap cigars and beers.

Yes we argued for hours and hours
about progress
but I bought the whiskey sours.

My chastity is no more worse than your near daily sobriety
and we’ll both end up forgotten and dead
so don’t make fun of the video poker players,
I have to come back here tomorrow.




dear friend,

lets get drunk and go to wal-mart
we’ll cruise the isles
and tear the toy department apart.

with jovial elation
we’ll return the greeters
salutation...

then ride the shopping carts
like Humvees through through the streets
of Baghdad.

courtesy clerks will frown at our hands
and under the florescent light
in the dressing room
i will touch the wetness that makes time stop.


Let’s drink vodka from a slurpee cup
ponder kitchen appliances
and compare them to our dwindling finances.

The courtesy clerks have seen it all before,
I touch your naked breast
and kiss you in the middle of the store.

We are old and ugly
maybe
or they are young and hard
like unripe fruit.
We maybe have bloomed,
and America is doomed,
so lets get drunk at Wal-mart.



Dangerous and unkempt men
are given knives and told to cook
for the feeble and newborn.

Molested men
dedicate their lives
to catching child molesters
and driving fords.

Women who have gone without
many times in their childhoods
are night hotel auditors
counting thousands of dollars.

The man with the gray ponytail
is as rigid and devoid of imagination
as the barstool he sits on.

A man named, ‘The Cookie Monster,’
plays Dixie on a guitar
and we all have heard of the man he stabbed to death.

When my wife stops complaining
I know somethings wrong.

The film maker
got laid last night
so he wont make films for a while.
By the Lake

I was flipping
suicide
like a coin in my head.
My wife remarked,
“Maybe someday
someone will say
Aunt Patrick and Lauren
used to take morphine
and sit by the lake.”
She is a good lady
and our life is good to.
I will flip the coin
into the lake
and wish
this never ends.
The only friendly face

A whole pig was delivered to the resturaunt.
It bled on the prep table
it’s mouth agape.
We tickled it’s nose
then cut what we needed from it’s body.

Through the food window
tired annoyed
insulted
sleepless
in debt
beautiful women
waited for the food
I made.
I made that!
Those brief seconds of eye contact
when food chages hands
are nice.

The transition
into the dining room
where the acoustics explode
in the med evil market place.

The dishwasher sold me a pill
“to kill it,”
he said.
If he only knew
the holocausts of slain days and nights.

Behind the bar
he holds court
and as the opiate dulls my spine
I politely refuse a drink in a ‘to go cup.’
I ain't no fucking drunk.

When the night is over
the tired
molested
abused
beautiful waitresses
act like
‘It was no big thing,’
as they count their money
that they will spend immediately
in fact they offer me a few drinks
looking down on my poverty.

I do a line of coke off a pocket mirror
in bathroom
with a warm waitress.
As she leans forward I can see her breasts.
In the little mirror
she sees
the only friendly face.