Stale Tobacco
Fresh apples
Squatting out back
With the folks
Peering out on my Garden of Eden
Stogies with my only
A piece of lung
Coughed up on the front patio
And suburban sunsets
Dogs howl howl howl
At smog-ridden skies
Crying out to be a tramp
In natural lands
Me, a soft member of their pack
Hoping to feed off of their after dinner scraps
And the roaches
In the crawlspace
Rolling papers left with the talent
And the busted up boys down the street
Put up their arms
Fighting for the delusion
Of freedom in suburbia
Daddy sits alone in his truck
On his way to work
Sucking the soul out of man
Like golf balls through garden hoses.
While I puff puff
On Johnny Appleseed
Out back
Some reach out for freedom
With worn out battle strategy
While others float down their rivers of stagnant shit
Accepting defeat
Militant men in 4X4 pickup trucks
Armed driving like Afghans
In American hummers
And the eyeballed boys
Crying out in their baseball uniforms
How many runs have they made?
How many runs are made at them?
Before I’m sitting on a dusty cot
Next to a man who committed no sin
To get into prison
He’s just a fan of the ass play.
Love your poetry but enough about fathers. Where are your poems about mothers??
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I could write about mothers, but in the context of this poem, I chose fathers. Puyallup is a town that I’ve always described as a community that’s put a ton of emphasis on masculinity. The women’s voices have been snuffed by the husbands. It would be a great poem to write about the oppression of women in this society, but other than silly assimilation (silly as in absurd, wrong). I would see women more as a victim in Puyallup, than an overall contribution to this hopeless town. Women aren’t provided the power to make that contribution.
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