The People Look Like Flowers at Last

I am
a series of
small victories
and large defeats
and I am as
amazed
as any other
that
I have gotten
from there to
here
without committing murder
or being
murdered;
without
having ended up in the
madhouse.

and like a claw reaching down into some pit of me,

surrounded by walls like tombs I answer meekly,

“memory is a poor excuse for the present”

and I am old:

pirate feet have trod

the clean-thatched floors

of my soul,

and the canaries sing no more.

if only at a funeral service

somebody would say,

“what an odious individual

that one was!”

even at my funeral

let there be a bit of truth,

then the good clean

dirt

or smoke for 6 months, and talk about biting iron with your

teeth, I’ve been drinking and smoking heavily and steadily with the

best

and the worst of them for over 50 years, yeah

because spiritual death arrives

much more quickly and unexpectedly than

physical demise.

I drop his new

if a man lives for 70 years he learns

one or two things—the first being: don’t confide unnecessarily

in your wife.

the second being: others may sometimes

understand you but

none of them will understand you

better than your wife

does

I tried to enter the freeway a

guy in a red Camaro almost ran me

off the road (red automobiles have always

annoyed me) so I swung after him, rode his

bumper hard, then swung around and we rode side-by-side

well,” I say, “I can’t keep on

forever writing poems about

spilling beer into the laps of

whores.

a man matures and moves on to other

things.”