Once late-summer storms blow past and leave

high pressure alone in their wake, cerulean skies

and bright, whippy wind, things start to dry

from the top down; they glisten, and I

in my kingly leisure lie among the maidenhair ferns

low in the woods by the once-parched creek.  Imagine

how I appear to them, those black and turkey

vultures who circle like a posse and endingly sink

as they ponder me, naked as the day I was born,

as dead and good as dead can get, like a morsel

from heaven, six foot one and a buck eighty-five

of solid wish fulfillment, a spread picnic of carrion.

They clasp their wings in gratitude, ah,

their good fortune knows no limit, me as meat

on the ground, lungs full of water and nothing

behind my face, my eyes open to the sky

they circumscribe.  See how they acknowledge our grief

with hunger, the best sauce; see how the red blisters

of their heads turn, turn, fixing on certainties

laid out for them like supper without a voice...

In my mind, Emmylou Harris is singing

with Gram Parsons; they're working through

that Louvin Brothers song about the way

the true heart's called back home before

the scoundrel finds his faith, the father making right

what ailed his child.  All the jokes we understand

are about misfortune; all the ones we don't

are about us.  The birds drop still, their circuits

shrinking, fix on me like I'm what's on t.v., then spot

my pulse.  Then a sudden ruckus, frenzy,

terror, wheeling away, a wild man screaming poems

at the gleaners of misfortune, I ain't dead yet motherfuckers,

hot-blooded as I ever was, quick as Clint Eastwood,

howling at the birds and world for everything I'm worth.