Because I didn’t blow baby’s breath blossoms
up the right skirt, called some gadabout
with 8 million of history’s coolest friends
a shithouse Robespierre. Because my sports idolatry
isn’t the saintliness of theirs, unable to say
where my favorite team is in the playoffs,
much less who they chose in the 18th round of the ’76 draft.
Because my favorite poets are too foreign
or too dead, that I’m not one of the 100k poets
for anything but sloth, can love Bukowski
and Gerard Manley Hopkins in the same beer breath.
Because I don’t shit fire and burst bloody hemorrhoids
over something stupid a politician said, and I didn’t sign
nor forward the petition to save the dwindling
habitat of rare red-assed monkey.
So I watch the number of friends fall, staring
but a few seconds at the lower sum, as if suspended
in that strange moment just before the game is called for rain.
|