Showerthirst

Oh
he's a Con, alright
though I can't say for sure
if only in his poetry
since some sorry broad buried
his sorrier ass
decades before
I was a gleam in my
donor's eye.

Sometimes his tips hit the head
for a line at a time
(the one about the root hitting the rock)
but more often than not
he got lost in High Romanticisim
(leave the candles out of it)
or rather: his fruitless search
for it.

But there is no Romance left, Prof. Aiken.

You'd think that someone
who found the murdered body
of his mother
and suicided body of his father
in a long since loveless bedroom
at age seven
would've known that.

Just another one that's let me down
like a bittersweet song interrupted by the phone.

The list.
The Goddamn
growing
list--

"For that which goes forth comes back changed or dead."