I'll just read two more.
One's a little short and one's a little long.
This is sort of a poem for the area in which I grew up,
which is a very strange, conflicted area,
as you will soon find out.
"The Likes of You."
The likes of you means each hour,
for lack of a church bell, your priest rings
a hand-me-down guillotine.
And into the wood chipper falls the farmhand
who each spring, instead of the cherry blossoms,
blooms from the cherry trees.
It means he's in league with your town
drunk, your chief of police.
It means they're reminiscing, blotto tonight,
about their reign of terror over the mud puppies,
and over the combine blades, and over the peregrines.
And they drape their 60,000 miles of veins like angel hair
from the last of the evergreens.
It means last on the list of everything
they'll never teach you about the white trash,
tax frauding unincorporated village that established you,
circa 1986.
And you won't find this in your want ad digest.
And you won't find this in your father's father's father's
Farmer's Almanac.
Is that when your dogs die of three species of tapeworm,
you hold each one by the tail like a broiler, start counting
off, nine, nine, nine.
And when you're pissing into the reservoir, when you're
poisoning the city's drinking supply, when
you're cursing the mayor's new pipeline and spray painting god
forgives, but we don't on the 99 cent clapboard
you stole from Wickham's and nailed
to the front of your house with a chukka boot,
you throw your dogs and their 17 bags of chow
into the west branch of the Delaware River.
It means they never teach you your brother's shadow.
It stinks like the priest's, only worse.
It means your thoroughbred with her lathered,
incomplete withers and Death's French accent in her cough.
When that horse dies of wet brain,
it means you buy all the worst liquor
you can find in the Legion Hall, and dump her
into the Delaware River.
And generations, generations you'll
hear them bragging about that backwoods
piss drunk horse funeral.
He wore out the skins on his hanger toms
and tossed each one like a hogshead of wine
into the west branch of the Delaware River.
It means the river floods for the 17th time in 10 years.
It means bloated and with four hooves pointed at god,
you positively ID the cow that won the blue ribbon
at the Delaware County Fair, floating dead
down the west branch of the Delaware River.
It means what they won't teach you
in the academy is how each drink you drink,
that's the last fuck you'll fuck.
And it means the last from the tallied up list of everything
they never intended to teach you about your heritage,
like least of all, how grateful you
ought to be that there's only this one world left
for you to die in.