I had self-esteem issues as a prior-service person.
I was ashamed to be a reenlistee. I hated those guys.
Retreads, I called them. Couldn’t hack it on the outside.
Came back in to an institutional setting, where rules would do
their thinking for them. Never a millennium. Just follow orders.
If you decide wrong once you are freed from choosing. I was
a career man. A lifer. Lower than a Skid Row bum.
I owed myself a drunk. I collected. I drank in a bar
full of wet-brain alcoholics from the Old Soldiers Home.
The two tunes on the jukebox were “Hello, Walls”
and “There Stands the Glass.” The beer drinker’s
national anthem. Think of John Travolta
in Off Magazine. The poorhouse fair.
Lost in the Funhouse. Let’s all party.