Allons a Lafayette

Sweating professional faces
With medically induced cleavage
Gumming up the screen
With lard bottoms and tattoos
Glare at me with all their what’s what—
It’s not just songwriters and poets with the blues

Papa’s grown out his beard
They tell me it’s crisis de middle age
Greying up the texted screen—
Old man with a teener heart
Without a good hoodie excuse
Let’s just go all dancing
And shake your tit fille caboose

Best bring your Yves St Laurent hankie
Cajun dust will be floating on high
Everyone praying for some cleaner air
Broke-foot dancing or a zydeco reel, you choose
Try keeping up with the button accordion, cher—
It ain’t just gamblers who sometimes lose

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The Sun Goes Round and Round

Did you see how that sun did sure set
Burning down and turning grass to hay
A fiery heat like in our redhead’s eyes
When things broke up but it’s gonna be okay
Too young to Afghanistan
Too young to learn life’s that dirty
Too young to have to always gear up again
An old old woman before she made thirty

Did you see those high night sparkled skies
Space with just enough empty to hide all the shame
Stars breathless shining down on we the unworthy
Though not so for our redhead who lost the game
Too young to Afghanistan
Too young to sail in the Horror Sea
Too young to fight it over and over again
Another veteran shotgun betrothed to PTSD

Did you see how that sun did early rise
A fresh start promise of another new day
Like the love flowing in a nurse’s pure heart
Floating in a speed boat off a New Jersey quay
Too young to Afghanistan
Too young to become so old old
Too young even if she’s only just fifty
With a sad sad story too often again retold

Young Gray Heart

Past wind-swept plains
A dress tossed to the floor
Is this real—
I can’t see you anymore?

A young-believing heart
Yearns for one no longer near.
When to speak or stay dumb
Is never made very clear.

Beyond the lonely sunset,
Tears find release:
Respite unreached afar,
Was this all just a tease?

Oh, years roll fast past the years,
Younger eyes for younger smiles now glow.
An old frayed belt now cinched so tight;
The lonely and the old have nowhere else to go.