ASPEN WINOS
You tickle my eighty-eights
with that shivering ragtime jive.
Not walking a straight line, why
should I listen to you? I arrived
in Carbondale bearing coal. How
stupid was that - these people
needed jackets and food, not coal.
-
Jimmy Heron had a sister named
Helen who died here of the plague.
No one knew what to call it. They
hadn't yet learned how to say AIDS,
and neither had I, but I'm not sure
anyway that females ever died of it.
-
Isn't that funny, the things we hear,
or don't hear. And nowadays anyway
no one says a word about it, like it
never existed, the whole crazy
shebang of death and gesture and
gaunt and fever and decree and,
well, and, just misery without
a name to call its own.
-
This piece of shit nowhere town
used to be Mauch Chunk. I always
thought that a reasonable name for
Welsh people and miners and peasants.
The railroad types who lived here too.
Then they changed it all over to 'Jim
Thorpe, PA.' Re-named after some
Native American olympic athlete
denied a slot on professional
football teams. Something like
that. Like telling Roger Daltry
he couldn't sing aloud, or Roger
Waters that he'd lost his crowd.
-
Sometimes shit doesn't add up.
(That's two shits in one poem;
a lot for me, though it used to be
a lot worse).
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