Old Folks: The Spent Effluent Collection (cont'd)

The Troubadours of Divine Bliss
were on the road in Montana, or Wyoming,
and heard a story on public radio
about how to clean your pet's
eye boogers with a Q-tip,
and wrote a song about it.
The radio called them
"crusts and discharges."

There's a bar
near my house
called Toe Jam's.
I visited it for my guide
to beer joints and liquor bars
along Highway 98, between
the air force base and the paper mill.
I rated them by barmaid cleavage,
passive smoke, karaoke night, and gangs
of motorcyclist quotient. Length of Happy Hour.
Frequency of rounds "on the house." A complex
algorithm. Walkabout, I called the book.
A Wine Tour of Parker, Florida.
A dingo ate my fiddle.

All smegma means
is dick-cheese.
I remember a disk jockey,
in Honolulu, stumped listeners
with the word, but all you had to do
was look it up in a medical dictionary.
Of course, like chlamydia, you couldn't do that
if you couldn't spell it, or your buddy had to give you
hand signals. I knew a guy who cheated on a test
to determine his vocational preferences.
He liked to work outdoors, and ended up
in an office. What do you answer if
you want to be a poet? Likes to bang
his head against the walls? A glutton
for punishment? Injustice-collector?
Stubborn as a painter?
Crazy as a shithouse rat?
Pukes blood that smells
like beer shit, fights,
screw a woodpile
in case there is
a snake in it?
Kicks pregnant women
down a flight of stairs and hollers,
"Mother." This was before the Frank Booth "Name That Smell" contest.

I guess this is an homage,
to Charles Bukowski, King of
the Hard-Mouthed Poets.
When he died, many small press
writers sought to fill the vacuum left
by his departure. They thought of themselves
as his successor. Dennis Hopper played Frank Booth
in Blue Velvet, sucking on a canister of Mexican bus fumes
and crying, "Mama," but there's no evidence The Buk did that,
except for a story he wrote. He wrote one about fucking a watermelon
and giving it to college students, too, but they were fiction, man.
Magical realism. Anyhow, the pretenders pestered John Martin with
their importunate comparisons. The King is dead,
long live The King. Retired undefeated.