And those who live on government cheese and carry it
home from a church entrance in a bag to
hide the kind deed you know from how they
actually sneak away, for sneak can take a
dozen forms, they are mostly overweight
and clueless, clueless, for they can't understand
analysis, how the mountain of their dreams
once it was denuded it was denuded
forever and the water stank and it will
take two hundred years to give the money back
for which they rub their eyes and scratch their webbed
hands, they whose children will never go to
the Latin schools of New Jersey, thus they will lose
the tongue and after awhile the candles that lit up
the books at night, the rough fruit boxes against which
they scraped their knees, the lost mountain, and cheese
ah cheese, with worms, what's going on, Abe Lincoln?











From Poetry Magazine, Vol. 185, no. 3, Dec. 2004. Used with permission.