Binge Hangar

You never think
It could happen to you

This fake life
Filled with ugly faces

You too
You've gone sour too

There were those times like big time
Then gone flat and puffy at the seams

Where did your secret fire go
That belly light that drew things in

Now rusty wires and pipes seem wicked
The magic having transferred

There is some kid living in context
You're melting

No time left to behave badly
Shave and get ready for work

Others were prepared, spectrum-ready
You, with pan flute and boots

When did that become cumbersome
The lot of it dried up and cranberried

You can't pass
You must drink

And on other foolish footpaths
You must stumble toward rocks

Looking into the woods for mirrors
But today only meat

life in reversE

Life in reverse
Not quite as fun
Unless you are losing a boxing match
Or getting a haircut in the winter

When a celebrity dies
They envy the poet
What is clenched in life
Has no real claws in the after

Then there is the train
That mundane delivery
Making mice of men
And mountains of mice

Perhaps in five billion
Things will reach the top and start sliding backwards
Making babies of us all
Once, twice -- however long it takes to unwind or rev up again

Even gets

There's a strange thing happens to men
They either flee or degrade
Past the point of usability
Shell of a man
Gives seed and leaves
Or
Gives seed and stays
Either way
He evades

There are steps and stairs
Steppes and stares
Lovely layered ladies
So carefully fluffed
They hate that too
So they fart
And snore
Wrestle and drink like sailors

Either way a man just falls apart
Biology knows when a man has paid his shilling
Starts at it
Like ribald rats
Then just falls apart
Like weak cotton
Threadbare
Sac fulla moths

We need more beer
Or mead or what have you
Man just asking
Fingers just doing
Guns just shooting

There's a forest of emerald musk
Dank with repentance
It's eighty hundred million years
It's a banquet of digestion
A damn frame of baroque intelligence
And them there's men
Just making due
Fixing things
With tape
And epoxy

Hard to give up on sarcophagus

Hard to give up on sarcophagus
Comfort replenishes comforter
Like lampshade castrates light
Sharpening the tippie-top of lonesome
To puncture, focus first
The hooded identity of space mother
And then hunting the father
With short jabs
From a stubby shank
Never reaching the conversation
Taking place over carded muskets
At the big table
Where corn is wasted
And patience is restored with whip