...That They Don't Understand

And when at length the drear and long time soothed thy fiercer woes,
How plaintively thy mournful song upon the still night rose

I've heard it often as if I dreamed, distant, sweet and lone;
The funeral dirge, or so it seemed, of reasons dead and gone.

Air held her breath; trees with the spell seemed sorrowing spectres round,
Whose swelling tears as dewdrops fell upon the listening ground.

But that is past, and naught remains that raised us o'er the brutes;
Our piercing shrieks and soothing strains are both forever mute.

Now fare thee well! Once, more cause than subject of woe.
All mental pangs by time's unkind laws hath lost the power to know.

O Death! thou awe-inspiring prince that keepst the world in fear,
Why dost thou tear more blest ones hence and leave madness lingering here?

Manifest Destiny & the Beginners Guide to Surrendering Sovereignty

A hot wind curls the leaves and chases the dogs digging deep into the dry soil.

I live in the gut of the bright failure called America.

I live in this hell named [fill-in-the-blank].

It's one hundred and seven today and grasshoppers from outer space are dancing in my brain.

The air-conditioner is broke so I run a tub of cold water and submerge every half hour.

There's a wet trail from the bath to the couch and nearby fan.The air is heavy with grain dust.

The "wheaties" are up from Oklahoma with their caravan of combines.

I crave winter. I want a blizzard that blinds me to my fellow man.

These are my dark times.

Every other day I grieve for the me that was and every man or woman I see fills me with contempt.

These half-wit inbreds love to imagine that nine out of ten "Skins" in our Gomorrahs are hang-around-the-fort welfare sucking addicts.

Yet every weekend their violence and drunken wretchedness fills this county's jail, so I'm far beyond embarrassment by these fucks that are worse than the boogiemen they prod each other into fearing.

Varied branches of that inbred, toothless mountain trash in "Deliverance,"settled here and now own
the bank and most businesses.

It's undeniably true that these white people in Cowturdville could be hillbillies except for the fact that these are The Plains.

Drive on, rednecks, to the edge of your flat world and fall down to a better hell.

Every single thing about this town is sadly second-rate and I haven't been laid in more than two years and there's this fat lady with varicose veins who calls me late at night and begs me to come over to her trailer for a drink.

Here, in this Panhandle town, farm kids speed desperately up and down the main drag wearing baseball caps backwards and throwing gang signs they've seen on the tube and their parents, glad they're old and tired, truly believe that those pictures we're now getting from Mars have meaning.

As far as I can tell, I'm one of the few people in Cowturdville who's gone to college and I often wish I never had, but Christ on a pogostick . . .

I think I'm starting to like it here in this American heartland.[ease in to the cushion of our adjustable apathy.]

Thunderheads are forming and the sweet-ass rain of forgiveness is in the air.

You Ain't a Beauty But Hey, You're Alright...

We make our meek adjustments,contented with such random consolations as the wind deposits in slithered and too ample pockets.For we can still love the world, those of us who find a famished kitten on the doorstep; we know recesses for it from the fury of the street; or warm, torn elbow covers.We will sidestep, and til that final smirk, dally the doom of that inevitable thumbthat slowly chafes its puckered index toward us, facing the dull squint with what innocence and what surprise!And yet these fine collapses are not lies more than the pirouettes of any pliant cane;
our obsequies are, in a way, no enterprise. We can evade you, and all else but the heart: what blame to us if that heart lives on. The game enforces smirks; but we have seen the moon in lonely alleys,
making a grail of laughter of an empty ash can,and through all sound of gaiety and quest; have heard a kitten in the wilderness.