IN
LIEU OF A LOUIS RESUME |
Some people say a man is made out of mud.
A poor man's made out of muscle and blood.
Muscle and blood and skin and bones,
A mind that's weak and a back that's strong.
You load sixteen tons what do you get?
Another day older and deeper in debt.
Saint Peter don't you call me 'cause I can't go.
I owe my soul to the company store.
I was born one morning when the sun didn't shine.
I picked up my shovel and I walked to the mine.
I loaded sixteen tons of number nine coal
And the straw boss said, “Well a bless my soul.”
If you see me coming, better step aside.
A lot of men didn't and a lot of men died.
One fist of iron, the other of steel—
If the right one don't get you then the left one will!
You load sixteen tons what do you get?
Another day older and deeper in debt.
Saint Peter don't you call me 'cause I can't go.
I owe my soul to the company store.
— Merle Travis/Tennessee Ernie
Ford
1.
"I can't imagine why anyone would
need my resume at
this late stage of the game, however, if you need one, I
might send it, and then again I might not."
2.
Recantation:
Before the Mast
in the year of
our Lord 2006
Ahoy Mateys!
Arrghh.
Me be looking
for scullery work
in English, no multi-
culti cross-dressing.
Level 1 Research
Institution preferred.
Full prof, adv. level,
tenure and valet
not negotiable.
Wine and stinky
cheese ok.
3.
But however much professional poets may be shocked by such carelessness, I consider it on the whole as an advantage, since our
brood of epigonous poets have nothing left but formal polish.
–Karl Marx
4.
"Poetry may make us from time to time a little more aware
of the deeper, unnamed feelings which form the substratum
of our being, to which we rarely penetrate; for our lives are
mostly a constant evasion of ourselves."
—T. S. Eliot
5.
I’m on winter’s sidewalk outside
my office, smoking with a student
I do not know. She’s big-boned &
horsey, a glorious gelding of a gal.
She says she has a violent cactus:
“I got it at the botany greenhouse.
They were going to throw it away.
One little prick can make you numb.”
“Maybe ten years ago,” I smile.
She is eighteen & the only thing
that registers is a kindly gray
haze standing before her.
The haze stubs out his smoke
& dissipates back towards
the warmth of his cell.