Papalote Unbound

The streets are dusty now like cows,
my high school friends have the bends,
the girls all have large rear ends,

each week Henry visits the topless clubs
to relieve the stresses of girls in dresses,
the beer is cheap like farm boy sheep,

having lived in the big city for so long
Henry finds he don’t belong no more,
his ways are quaint, Mr. Bones ain’t.

Inside Wal-Mart you can’t tell the difference,
everything is cheap Chinese,
Papalote equals Paris, Texas,

coming back home for funerals and weddings
stirs the bottom of the cow pond
and the bullfrogs of my early poems,

they make a racket that wakes up the dead.
Coleridge loved the Germans, Keats the Greeks.
Henry’s always been a sort of Chicano geek.