2 Poems by
John Birkbeck
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MEATING THE GREYHOUND LADY
A-foul of the law
and gone to ground
in disguise & aliased;
alive to the dangers
of life as a renegade,
I wuz ready for
The Greyhound Lady
whooze body musk
worked as an aphrodisiac
on my decadent nose
and venereal glands,
and whose whiskey wafts of
hillbilly laffter intoxicated
and drove me wild to git
this lady off the bus
and into a cheap hotel
in some big city like Atlanta
or Birmingham.
This, not being another
hardcore porn raconte,
the lurid details of
this desolate tryst
will remain tacit,
for who, having lived
awhile on this earth,
cannot fill in the lines,
nor re-imagine
the rusty bedspring music
and subsquent quick escape
to Kansas City or New Orleans
or Fort Worth or Texarkana
or Fort Smith or elsewhere,
only to haul onto some other
Trailways bus and
plop down next to
some other ripe summerfuck--
and more bad whiskey,
and an endless road
and more bad whiskey.
forever ahead.
Habitual Prodigal
As always she'd materialise
suddenly from nowhere
and yet everywhere,
after long arbitrary
and capricious absences,
to turn up suddenly
at the Hamburg Inn,
or at Gabe's, or the
Deadwood or at Mama's
in Iowa City;
and when I'd say,
"Where have you been?"
a tumble of irrelated
place names would erupt:
Atchafalaya, Jackson Hole,
Nacogdoches, Port St. Joe,
Quebec City (why Quebec City?)
"Why Quebec City?" I'd ask,
but there was always more--
Brisbane and Tasmania,
and various locales throughout
Sea Asia, the subcontinents,
and on and on, et cetera,
reciting still more places
that drained me of geography
(world traveller tho I was).
"And where to next?" I'd say,
and she'd say there was never
any Next, just rest stops
from time to time
at the Hamburg Inn.
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