STRANGER IN A STRANGE LAND
I’m a stranger in a strange land,
he said when he called.
Work’s tough.
Into a project I don’t know if I can handle.
I let the woman I work with emasculate me.
It’s draining.
I go home to bickering.
Wife is upset with son. Son is upset with wife.
Wife is upset with me that I don’t back her.
I hate it.
He talked some more.
Then, I told him my usual tales of woe
and the Lyme disease
that had me worn-out weary.
Hey, he said in hanging up,
thanks for really being there when I call.
That’s important,
you know.
Sure, I said in closing,
thinking how shared mutual misery
always helps take the sting
out of daily living.
Stranger in a strange land?
Damn, that’s a poem!
TRUCK STOP BLUES
Sometimes a man just has to get out of town,
out on a highway without destination
where he’s lost
from a past that holds no face of future
drive somewhere, maybe along old Route 66
through a lonely, prairie-state county,
deep into the middle of a night
where maybe the light from Eddie’s
Pure Oil Truck Stop pulls him over
for gas at a dollar ninety-eight a gallon,
and the skinny waitress at the counter,
nighttime pretty to weary eyes,
brings hash browns and eggs-over-lightly
and where his quarter drops into the juke box
for he and old Hank
to croon a lovesick blues
deep into the yellowed light of night.
