Clay Matthews–Superfecta

This is a poem, by Clay Matthews,  posted at Girls with Insurance today. It fits right in here, but please follow the link and read the other good stuff they have to offer, then visit Ghost Road Press or Blazevox and pick up his book(s), why don't you? I will be doing so forthwith.

Hit-or-Miss Elegy

There are a thousand terrible names

one person can call another, and I have said them all.

All my memories begin a little bit confused,

but I was eighteen and standing on rotten carpet,

there were short-sleeve shirts on a chair, my brother

and I in a trailer parked at the edge of a cotton field,

Nicky and Kenny, two guys we worked with,

all of us for my dad, cutting some meth on a small table,

asking if we still wanted to go frog gigging.

These are the people that other people say

shouldn’t have free health care. These are the people

others say should just rot. Natural selection,

rubbish to the wind, worthless pieces of shit,

and on and on. The irony here is that they

don’t care about health care, anyway,

they don’t care about the government, they don’t

care about their teeth or livers, they don’t care

about much but right, right now. A paycheck is a long way

away most of the time. A week is an eternity.

I am friends with these people, but I am not them.

I am half in love with their lives at eighteen,

and the other half in love with their lives today.

So we all kind of move around the trailer in different ways.

Awkwardly with the drugs on the table and a gun

resting in the corner. More familiar when it was

another trailer that my sister lived in, fourth of July,

baked beans in the oven, fireworks lining up

in the dead grass outside. Redneck, poor white trash,

say whatever you want. I’m confused about a lot

of things. I don’t blame you. Nicky and I used to work

hard together, building utility trailers, we used to go out

on Friday nights and drink at the Blue Moon,

I was underage, he was just wanting to be perpetually young,

wondering about how to get fired from another job

so he could draw unemployment, so he could do nothing

while collecting your hard-earned tax money.

These are the kind of people I’ve called names, too.

Whether bum or prick, lazy bastard or junky,

we named each other in the daylight and dark hours

before and after we would meet up for drinks.

In my town, we all had names. And we were all known,

too, by the names we’ll never know, mouthed

in the cabs of cars and to different sorts of friends

and while driving back to college or in line

at the grocery store trying to buy cigarettes

with food stamps. Everybody wants

so much. Some of my neighbors today

would love to be able to carry concealed pistols

in bars. I would like student loan forgiveness.

We’re begging, like dogs, little ideologies barking

all over the place. And what is right or wrong?

These are my friends. I look at us all

and love us for what we are and are not:

fathers, sisters, racists, the unemployed, addicts,

assholes, etc. and so on. I am eighteen again.

I am thirty-one next month. I am looking at the rain

outside, waiting for the sun, and wondering if Nicky

is dead yet. It’s easy to miss him right now,

being so far away. If he’s alive, I’m sure

he’s still a worthless son-of-a-bitch. But even

a worthless son-of-a-bitch deserves better.

Clay Matthews Runoff