M.P. Powers

Shit Town

No one here listens to Beethoven.
No one reads the Greeks, or Shakespeare, 
or Nietzsche. (Or if they do
they keep it a secret, 
not wanting to be made fun of
for being an elite, or pretentious).
Shit town. 

A town whose mayor moonlights as a life
coach despite his 2 bankruptcies 
and 7-year glue sniffing addiction.
Shit town. 
Where half the cops are peeping
toms and cat burglars by night.
Where the barbers can’t cut hair or hold 
a decent conversation.
Where the plumbers call themselves 
crapologists.
Where every Circle K has a beercan 
philosopher 
standing outside it and the firemen 
just want to hold a big hose.
Shit town.

And it’s true what they say.
Nobody here cares about anything but money;
poetry counts for nothing and no one 
ever seems to mention 
the night Jim Vulva, the town preacher, 
mixed ketamine with Viagra
and mugged a Bolivian tomato picker
behind the trouser rack at Big & Tall.
“Yo, dog, that bling is fly,” he said, then admitted
feeding his ‘libtard’ stepfather to feral 
hogs and collecting the insurance money 
for the next two years.
Shit town.

And the women here have all the charm 
of a goat chewing bumblebees.
And the kids bathe in that irrigation
ditch behind Jersey Mike’s Subs.
And there’s a drive-thru lane at the morgue
because it used to be an Arby’s.
Shit town.
And the rent adjustment commissioner
just got run over
by his own lawnmower
and ended up in the bag.

“Hey, I’ll lather myself 
in the bodily fluids 
of Joe Rogan if I dern-tootin’ want to,”
said Cotton 
Snyder, 32, a disgraced softball
coach and highly qualified bug
zapper
from Big Beaver, Saskatchewan.

And it was the eleventh hour
of the Feast of the Apparition of Our Lady 
of Guadalupe
and we were eating fish head stew
we’d heated up on the dashboard 
of a Buick Roadmaster
when Don Parcheesi, 45, a Chinese
herbalist from Chokoloskee,
ran out into the parking lot with his hair
on fire and offered a pair of eel-skin
slippers to the Judges of Hades.
“You bastards!” he shouted. “Give me life! 
Give me life!
Make
things beautiful!”