I'd like to read some newer poems now.
I'm working on another chapbook of poems which is
titled the "Bull Engine Sulks."
To be pronounced correctly, it should be the bull engine
"sul-uks."
It's a Western colloquial expression.
You go into a bar and you go up to Ed and say, hi, Ed,
and Ed doesn't say anything.
You go over and ask Jim, what's the matter with Ed?
No, he's got the bull engine sulks.
Seems to me that that's a characteristic mood
that we find in the West and these poems are about the West.
I'll select a few of them.
First one is called "Knives, Bonner Montana."
Inside the mill town laundromat barn cafe,
a man stands like a knife, holding the day's
first smoldering beer.
The same edge in his head today and it loves his aging,
each week of his life, who did this to me?
Was five dull metal days of being locked in his own brain.
Make somebody pay, two nights drunk and do it again.
Outside on the ground, the first priest
here saw human skulls, hundreds, called it
the Hellgate place of ambush.
Down the road, another town, another bar,
another surly County where the West waits
woman who knows her man's friends will get drunk,
go home like the old twist jawed trout in the river,
hooked and escaped.
Sullen man waiting for a stranger,
patient as the long flaked volcanic glass splinters
stuck in the bone ridden ground, these knives.