Born with nothing to lose 

Born smart
born happy

but surrounded 

by the deliverer, that dull dumb mean one 
(her muumuu tied around your throat)

in two rooms.

Your baby shoes, the tv guide,

the tv dinner, your first and last  

job application (not filled out, already rejected) 
on the tv tray.

Sooner or later you’ve got to get in the way

or else become a helper, committee member, tv starer, 
facebook follower, church youth camp macrame mentor,

good deed runner.

Or—you get way out of the way
and run like hell. 

That’s no music for LIFE

I don’t even drink anymore

I rode the alcohol to get off the pain

and for me it was a Tilt-A-Whirl
with a permanent ticket, so I got off,

but since I do care about others 
why is the liquor store CLOSED 

at nine at night around here and all day Sunday?

Don’t say that, because everyone knows God likes a drink.  

God drinks it all in
all our restrictions, in His name 
swishes it around in the God mouth, spits it out and says—
don't look at me 
and who's to say I'm a He? 

God drinks, drank, gets d r u n k 

every time they put their cold clammy ecclesiastical 

inquisitional hands 

on that pipe

organ. 

Boy Scouts of America

(and elsewhere) 

She shot me with the novocaine

the warmest funniest woman 

my new Cuban dentist friend

then she told me in a nutshell 

as I went numb

about her life of limits, from
grandfather to father to husband;  

she couldn’t do anyone’s teeth 

couldn’t deaden a man’s mouth 

in Cuba. 

But that's over; in a nutshell—she ended it. 

I asked for another two shots

of novocaine, because I couldn’t take it

then I lay there in the chair and thought

(as she whistled, getting her silver diggers 

and pokers out of the autoclave)

of all she’d had to take 

because of misogyny. 

Misogyny. 

Some men are gonna need surgery. 
Maybe even a dictionary.