Finding Love in This Town

 I want to live here forever, in this town founded

as Whitman went blind.  No, before, back before

when America resided just over the track of folklore.

I’ll build my house with shotguns just over that track

and worship the Friday night roughhouse pathos.

I’ll live here in this town that rolls her sleeves up

to fist out land disputes, devours red meat,

drinks too much, and pushes the wind with screams before

the consecutive blasts from the hot-tip of a Midnight Special.

I’ll meet a woman in this town.  She’ll have a brown felt tongue

and maybe a trumpet gold tooth that will blow

a jazzy ditty when she screams for me

to start a fire or flip the flapjacks.

In this town, there must be a woman,

with red-breasted cheeks and wet jeweled lips

waiting for me in an egg blue dress at Mikey’s Grill

or The China Garden and she’ll be wearing a yellow perfume

so strong it emits a desperate sound audible only to dogs.

My pheromones will magnetize her negative

charge into my positive.  "What are you

wearing?" she’ll ask as we float into a crash,

two love-blinded semis who couldn’t read the chemical maps

of each other’s fragrant attraction.

Her libido, on Saturday nights, will powder on

a cost/benefit make-up and slip into

a short skirt of simultaneous fantasies.

As she gets fatter over the years, as they all do

in this town, she’ll seek out the knife

to reassure a size 100 panic.  In her sleep

she’ll blurt tummy tuck, titty lift

and I’ll  laugh and slap her back

to sense with an interpretation of Corinthians 13. 

Love is... Love is not... Love is... Love is not...

In this town, there must be a woman who makes love,

does a great sex like destroying a puzzle.  What surface!  

What juices! What color!  Her thighs as pink as a brain or

the before lung in a quit-smoking campaign. 

Her throat will frill out like the inner linings of cabbage

and her hooded bulb, like a lady bug, will wait

to be teased into flight. But, this town,

its hard drinking and minimum wage brow beating

will get to me as it does every man here, and telling

her that sometimes a smack is just a smack,

will be the closest thing to an apology this town will offer. 

Things will be significantly different after that

up until one Autumn Sunday,

after two hours of Trinity Broadcast Network programming

and finishing off my first fifth, she’ll go

for breakfast and not come back.

I'll take the Rambler down to The Henhouse

and help myself to a happy hour sampling, betting

I get happier as sobriety runs further.  Men in here,

women in here, drink with drunk dummy faces.  Men squint

as their emasculated cyanide establishes contact

with the sad tubes of their gut.  Women prowl

the back walls with a snake’s revenge for a murdered mate.

The men are waist deep in alcohol palsied common sense

begging for a good fuck to brag about.

Their eyes flux about the room for a woman

who looks as if she constantly chooses men

who are irreparably damaged.  When last call comes

four men are incapable of self-defense,

one man is outside passing out religious tracts,

three are off  to pollinate indiscriminately,

and inside everyone lives the subconscious

herbivore of a shark hoping to some day get clean,

some day be forgiven, some day get a job that lasts over

one week and to be loved for years.