CHRISTMAS EVE

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.