interim work

I don’t think of this as a first draft exactly; more of a poem I have to write to get it out of the way so I can do a better job with the topic. People seem to like these better sometimes…I don’t get it, really. Anyway…
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kiss my ass
if you don’t like it —
i’m all in favor
of performance enhancing drugs.

those bodies on the field
are already sculpted just for us
and our desires. if a cream or a shot
of the clear gets them over the lip
of the bowl of the common gene pool
then i say why not?
no one expects the artist
to go without absinthe, no one imagines
the guitarist without his joint, the heroin
sponge saxophone player is practically iconic
and an MC without Cristal is like a day without night —

so, my dope fearing
blunderbuss moralists, stop kidding yourselves,
not much in this world gets done without recourse
to higher powers, outside forces, help from friends —

for example, imagine your world
without the black fig flavor of crude oil,
or your war without the taste of cordite;
could you have a foreign policy without the fix
of raw blood spilled in a Beirut market —
copper on the tongue,
seasoned with oxygen from the open air
and more than a dash of the families’ tears,
sweeter than blonde hashish?

would you have your pleasant life
without mainlining the sewage and rot
of a Ninth Ward street? you inhale
the dust from crumbling bridges —
does the rush come from the secret thrill of knowing
your taxpayer dollars misapplied
made this batch just for you,

or is it the deaths that get you off?

how is it exactly
that you can take a boy from Detroit
and kill him in Kandhuhar,
stand there glassy eyed at his funeral
praising
the way the Army saved him from the drugs and the street,
and one week later pat the shoulder
of the man who grew
the poppies you claim
you saved him from
just because he kills more selectively
when he’s at home?

you have to be high on something.

addicts, junkies,
athletes, artists,
captains of industry,
lords of creation,
all of us
need a little help.
we can’t do it alone.

so kiss my ass
if you think that steroids are cheating, that
weed’s a gateway drug,
that there will ever be a drug-free performance
on the scale you demand for your pleasure.
toke, suck, snort, boot, lick and drink up,
there’s a world out there for the crushing.
we need a little something
to give us strength.