Screw job

The government should have been in adult films.

It was always thinking up new and inventive 

ways to fuck you:

tax the roads, tax the air, tax the water, tax the tax…

Squeezing a little more from a little less until

things fell out of focus.

Screwed from all sides by Big Brother, 

what a perfect porn star name:

tax the birds and the bees and the hours

beyond saving.

Loser

You find yourself out of work again

with a record the hipster vinyl shops can’t hawk,

and this new one that calls you a loser with those 

pretty painted cocksucker lips that always have an exit,

and the previous one that will only speak through lawyers

and take the children.

Stomaching the tired Men’s shelter coffee,

determined to prove the faces on the parole board wrong.

That you will not be back here in seven months

professing a plan and begging for leniency;

bank robbers speak of easy money,

but none of this seems easy 

to me, the Polaroids you pin up over the bed

to remember their faces.

That way everyone wants you to fail 

so they can be paid as experts,

collecting grants and degrees and children

named Aspen that will never know the first thing

about the indignity of evening louse checks, 

or that sadistic way the church

scours the halls of the desolate 

trying to scrounge up a few

more believers after 

hours.

Lost in the Dreamtime

I am not old, so much as ancient before my time.

Mesopotamia is not as far back in the rear-view mirror

as one might think.

I’ve been going to bed earlier these days,

snoring louder and louder.

Elbowed in the side by this woman

who has agreed to paint my sarcophagus 

some non-existent grey.

To breathe the same air and call it oxygen

in the doom and gloom survivalist’s sense. 

My teeth and eyes are still mine, 

but there’s no telling for how long.

Science can come and try take them,

but they won’t succeed.

I failed science, but not nearly as much

as it will fail all of you.

I just hope I’m dust by them.

Some asshole down at the crematorium 

snorting me up his nose 

because he believes I am cocaine 

and that he will get high.