You should listen to your mother (For Nancy Sinatra)




Didn’t your mother ever tell you not to believe everything you hear?
She knew the truth about people like me, though you and I know you’re a sucker for my kind.
If I was a poet, someone would call me a genius and give me a prize.
Folks would pay me for what I do, rather than me having to take it.
But I’m no genius, just a clever rat in a cage full of rats and if I don’t take what you have, someone else will.
It’s simple mathematics.
Just be glad that I’m the kind that cons you into giving me what I want.
Other people might take it with a gun.
And let’s face it, you like being conned -- a least a little.
You get a show for your money, and I get to act like I really care about you.
The truth is, I couldn’t take anything from you if you didn’t figure you were getting something out of the deal.
The people I still from are looking for something for nothing anyway, I just give them nothing for something.
Think of it as a life lesson, something that you can teach your kids
Maybe they’ll listen to you better than you did your mother.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Crystal clear

Image
    I clean the windows once a week, squeaky clean so I can see the whole street, as there is no glass at all, and I see every detail of every tree and house the smudges blind me to sometimes. I have no acute fascination with what goes out there or in the houses of my neighbors; I just don’t like not knowing things, half the reason I troll news websites knowing I won’t like or agree what I get yet determined to know what it is I disagree with. My neighbors think I’m nosy because they see me when I see them, and they snarl at me when I come out to collect the newspaper from my doorstep, saying untrue things perhaps to get me angry. I mostly don’t talk with them when I don’t have to, and I listen to them only when they complain about my dog being off his leach and leaving not-so-friendly calling cards on their manicured lawns. Sometimes I see too much, the domestic disputes through their unguarded windows, shades down as husband-and-wife shout things I cannot hear, kno...
Read more

Oh what a strange trip it’s been

Image
  They’re all gone. The people and the visions. Though the living room looks like Kansas after Dorothy left it. Food strewn across the carpet, revealed in the orange wedge of sunlight as I throw open the porch curtain to let in fresh air. The place smells of pot and hormones -- ashtrays overflowing with the endless parade of more ordinary cigarettes. Butts even float in the bottoms of almost empty wine bottles. I smell him, the stranger who stalked my girlfriend all night, giving us both hits of LSD as if the each tiny tablet was key for his getting between her legs. His heavy cologne stains me with the outraged I was too stoned to stop. She slumbers in the other room alone as I stand naked, bathed in sunlight. I am changed. A chemical reaction running me in a way I can’t describe, as if I was the rape victim, as if my virgin thoughts have been violated by the light show and the hallucinations, s if I am some new person craving to get back to what I once was. I’m too scared to wake...
Read more

Am I in hell?

Image
The wind blows across the Texas Panhandle like sandpaper across my face, a harsh sun making this dip south feel like a trip through hell. I think of LA and how much I miss its dismal streets and how I ache to get back to a place where rain takes a whole season to wash the world away, rather than this place which dumps it all on you at once after months of slow scalding torture. I keep thinking I’m already dead, despite the doctors’ claims – they asking me again and again if I’ve ever used a dirty needle or made love to another man. They make assumptions about me because my driver’s license says I live in LA. They ask me for a list of lovers, then shake their heads when I give them one, trying hard to make out the boy’s names from the girl’s, and wondering how on earth they will manage to contact them all, eyeing me as if they suspected me of deliberately spreading a plague. The car radio naturally stopped working in St. Louis. So I feel again in the glove compartment for the box of bat...
Read more