Nursing Long Beers in Tiltonsville

Look what contest I was encouraged to enter yesterday!

Look what novel is being advertised, the one I bought two weeks ago two hours after reading the review; I can't get past page 20 if it's either page 21 or a stomach virus.

The entire shelf, superfluous! Which has nothing to do with anything but serendipity, as does the email inviting me, by way of some mailing list, to a poetry contest the same day as drinks with my mentor/friend GOB, he who made me promise back in 2004 when this shetty bleg started to never post my poetry. I've honored that promise - O, I know you say you released me, but that's shabby begging shabby*, yo. If any want to see some, you can find some.

GOB's obamapostasy is six months behind mine but closing rapidly. His sense of relief that his retirement is soon, our employer eager to buy him out, that he'll beat the true effects of simmering clusterfuck when it finally and fully clusterfucks, shocks him in its callousness. He listened to things I said - what I yodel here - and for the first time in our fifteen, sixteen years of relationship, he ceded me the steering wheel without shouting I drive too recklessly.

My not driving recklessly got him, surprised him. My fuck it, I'll walk impressed more than years of wheelies. He was thinking about his portfolio of wheelies more than mine.

$20, the poetry contest. Who's in?

AUTUMN BEGINS IN MARTINS FERRY, OHIO

James Wright

In the Shreve High football stadium,
I think of Polacks nursing long beers in Tiltonsville,
And gray faces of Negroes in the blast furnace at Benwood,
And the ruptured night watchman of Wheeling Steel,
Dreaming of heroes.

All the proud fathers are ashamed to go home.
Their women cluck like starved pullets,
Dying for love.

Therefore,
Their sons grow suicidally beautiful
At the beginning of October,
And gallop terribly against each other's bodies.

Another....

*Spanish midfield. Come on, work w/me.