fowarding

today i'll do all the bad things

smoke in the house

drink all day

laze about ne're do welling

sex on the coffee table

heroin in the bathroom

talk politics like it matters

cocaine on the baby's changing table

*

i mean the country i grew up in it's 

being murdered in front of my face 

from the inside, with full faith and confidence

of the american government backing it up i saw

a home town  hero

arrested - protesting a man who was elected

not crowned, busted for speaking his mind which

puts a chill on the things you wanna say online

but don't  let that cross my mind at this time

i'm llearning to sing again.

lost my voice a few years back

aortic aneursim, abdominal.

subliminal changes to the box

where was i? oh yes

getting old. i mean my dad's old.

87. just had surgery for pancreatic cancer

living in his mobile home in ft myers kindly

deflecting any help from his daughters

cuz he's got people who help. community.

i'm grateful. i don't have the bandwidth.

there's a reason they let the old retire. 

we're not exactly useless but we're slow.

it's all the aches and pains you see

it's not that younger me didn't have them

it;s that younger me had better regenerative properties.

i could recover faster, more thoroughly.

face it, i'm a spent team horse that's only gonna

drag the whole thing down. 

i've only been dreaming about work.

gone are the fanciful end times stories

planes dropping bombs

oceanside camaraderie

snippets of other lives dripping into mine

 the only dreams i remember

are about work. involve the upper management

at work. the trump supporters. or maybe i only

dream of the tornado that can pick up and splinter

all my small plans onto the nebraska plains

()

i have been sick. it's not just whatever

viruses find their way into my system it's

the toll of the murder in process. it's the feeling 

so powerless. it's watching the vampire draining his victim

from behind a hurricane proof window

knowing the only way to save them is to crash it

with the force of  thousands, hundreds of thousands of deaths.

and the face skulls out

flesh dissapears to reveal the bone underneath

the promises delivered. 

the body drained, the monster fed.

but ever greedy.insatiable.

you and i we

only survive by chance like ants

drowned in a sea of blood.

**

how delightful.

()

they can call it fmla.

i've lost 20 lbs since november

unable to eat or bulemic, diarhetic.

sugar stays down. no lactose. 

pizza is out, milkshakes out, yogurt-out

 i know there are alternatives but

they're expensive and hard to find. 

low choice. sugar free and lactose free.

i'm picky. picky picky. when i was kid

i wanted to be picky. the only thing i got away with

was i didn't have to drink sweet tea. i could have water

which still threw off the rhythm of gramma's

sunday dinner  cuz you'd have to remember to leave one

ice full glass empty when  pouring the pitcher.

picky. so now i'm old and tired and i know i keep 

saying that but man, if you're young you just don't get it

and if you're here you're just nodding saying land the plane suzy.

which is coming in without  landing gear 

and i've never flown one of these things before.

hope we make it out alive.

~

i saw the ducks wander up the driveway

headed for the porch where we feed the strays

we used to have four cats, all elderly. 3 died within

a year of each other and the fourth, a marmalade, 

has allowed the orange colony that lives under the trailers

access to our porch. maybe because we gave them all names.

i'm sure they have others, they don't live here. just hang out

waiting for the dull tinkle of kibble against plastic

to emerge from the siding or under a bush.

a watering hole. but the ducks

have caught on. now they come advertising

their presence with shit spots on the drive way

honey always runs them off with ice cubes

yelling get off my lawn!

i hiss at them , it seems to work. 

these are the kinds of days that i , at 65

should be able to experience. i've worked

since i'm 15 paying into the system currently

being dismantled by the king and his krony kousins.

they keep moving the goalposts. 62, to 65, now 66 7 months

wtaf ?i'm pretty sure ,by the way wormtongue 

 uses it as the carrot

for all this sticking

that whole system is gonna be cut with some royal

interpretation of the statutes establishing the whole program.

which , by the way, IS an entitlement.

like, i paid in as investment(think 401k)

 i'm entitled to the payout. 

yeah, i think if we could somehow take the social out of it

wordwise

we could keep it.

 naw

that's wishful thinking.

vampires are ever hungry.

****