RODEO POET BARNSTORMER

                                              Ain’t no money in poetry
                                              That’s what sets the poet free
                                              And I’ve had all the freedom I can stand.

                                                          Guy Clark—“Cold Dog Soup & Rainbow Pie”

Eighty-nine copies of your latest
alliterative lariati title—
sans remaining space for one more
iambic molecule of mold or mildew, one more
squashed mouse poop em dash—
crammed into the Genuine Split Cowhide
suitcase you wheedled
out of your widow neighbor in trade for
your soon-to-be-released spoken-word 8-track
at her Moving-To-Rest-Home Living Estate Sale,
you fly Loop-The-Loop Airlines
to your next big gig. In your head,
you rehearse in pig Latin—straining
to make them funny—the same ten epic
comical poems you kind-of remember
composing decades ago. Their Rip van Winkle
barbiturate-laced-with-melatonin potency
clotheslines you into REM sleep
so primal, you dream that you dream
that the aft luggage hatch, unpuckered
as the prolapsed sphincter of Pterodactylus,
dumps your poetic fusillade down
like lutefisk and lefse on the land
of the other white meat.  Outside Dubuque,
dewlapped men in bibs and hip boots,
after the runic deluge, peel pages
off the sides of silos. Hog Gazette
headlines read: PLUTONION SPACECRAFT
BREAK-UP OVER DUBUQUE
SCATTERS DOGGEREL DEBRIS. You wake up
to the stewardess’s buh-bye, bub-eye,
bub-bye refrain, sign two free glossy press photos
after your show, get wheedled into swapping,
straight across, your cloth-bound letter-pressed 
limited editions for mimeographed
chapbooks by slam cowboy poets from the Bronx,
and vow never again, after an oh-dark-thirty a.m.
ham-bacon-chorizo-goat-cheese-scramble,
to doze your way back east again.

This is the second, and last, of this “Rodeo Poet Series” that, for obvious reasons, fizzled quicker than you can say “stupid idea.”  On the flipside, what a perfectly complete pair—one addressing the stage, the other addressing the page.  Or, to paraphrase, one for the road and one for the load.  

RODEO POET HORSE-MANURE FORKER

Not your run-of-the-mill manure,
no sirree—these are creative greenbacks
in the round, wads of quadruple sawbucks, hard
cold October simoleons, ingots
alchemized, frozen into gold
bullion bouncing off
fartknocker Fort Knox
terra firma. You fork and shovel
tractor bucketfuls. Booty, plunder, loot,
doubloons, you hear the most
horseshit-delusional snake oil salesman
part of your swashbuckler self
barking, as you rake it in and pile it
high as hay you paid two months’ wages for. Manure,
hay. Hay, manure. Ars poetica
agronomics. Because it takes manure
to make manure, which makes hay
while the sun shines. Kind of
like ashes to ashes, like what goes
around comes around—old road-apple
planet earth rotating
on its pitchfork tine axis, perfect
metaphor from your saloon hall gal
muse with her soothing
ma-nure, ma-nure, ma-nure
mantra she wants you to ruminate
the deep-hidden, shit-eating-grin
meaning of. Thusly inspired—
your arm thrown over the 16-hands-high
withers of this rhythmical word
rewarding a job well-rhymed—you nicker and neigh
each stinking-rich step of the way
home to the poetic bank.