Poem of the Day 07.04.09

one of the best

he was born to a narcissistic nag
and a car salesmen
in new orleans
and maybe the madness was already
setting in then
but he managed to make good
with a college degree
and a master’s degree
and a few teaching gigs
in new york city and louisiana
until he gave it up
to hang with musicians in
the french quarter
selling tamales from a cart
and working in a clothing factory
all while the madness kept bubbling
from below
and he started pounding away
on a machine at night
writing beautiful insanity
a prose that “isn’t really about anything,”
as the big book houses
kept telling him in rejections
but he knew he had it
he knew he had the genius and words down
the way they should be
but he couldn’t quite make it happen
he got hooked on the drink
he got hooked on his domineering mother
and some people said that maybe
he was a fag because the writing
and the booze and his mother
left him no time for a piece of ass.
then one day he blew a gasket
and just disappeared
he took a car and barreled it to the west coast
and then all the way back to georgia
to have a drink with the ghost of flannery o’connor
before driving off to biloxi
to put a garden hose full of car exhaust down
deep into his gut
leaving the world less than what it was before
and the rest of us silly word slingers failing
just to catch a whiff of his lunatic soul