Never sleep with a woman who is doing you a favor.

If you’re struck by a bully, turn the other cheek. If he
                 whacks you again, shoot the sumbitch.

Keeping it is always twice as difficult as getting it.

Never drive through a small town at 100 mph

with the sheriff’s drunk fifteen-year-old daughter

naked on your lap.

Never draw against the drop.

If you’re not confused, you don’t know what’s going on.

Love is always harder than it feels.

Killing

Only two ways

You can justify

Killing a critter:

If you’re aiming to eat it,

Or it’s fixin’ to eat you.

Death and Dying

Don’t matter diddly

When, where,

Or how

You die.

Important thing is,

Don’t take it personal.

New Poems

Short Prose

The Banker

His smile is like a cold toilet seat.

He shakes my hand as if he’s found it

floating two weeks dead in a slough.

I tell him I need money.

Tons of it.

I want to buy a new Lamborghini,

load it with absinthe and opium,

and hit the trail out of these rainy hills

for a few years in Paris.

I try to explain

I’m at that point in my artistic development

where I require a long period

of opulent reflection.

The banker rifles my wallet.

Examines my mouth.

Chuckles when I offer 20 Miltonic sonnets

as security on the loan.

Now he’s shaking his head, my confidence,

my hand good-bye. “Wait,” I plead,

“I have debts and dreams

my present cash flow can’t possibly sustain.”

“Sorry,” he mumbles, “nothing I can do,”

and staples some papers

in a way that makes me feel

he’d rather nail my tongue to an ant hill.

I stare at him in disbelief.

And under the righteous scathing of my gaze

the banker begins to change form.

First, he becomes a plate of cold french fries

drenched in crankcase oil.

Then a black spot

on a page of Genesis.

Finally, a dung beetle,

rolling little balls of shit

across a desk bigger than my kitchen.

Yet even as I follow these morbid transformations

I never lose sight of his bloated face,

the green, handled skin

shining like rotten meat.

But then his other faces

open to mine:

father, lover, young man, child–

our shared human history

folding us into one.

And only that stops me

from beating him senseless

with a sock full of pennies.

The Real Last Words of Billy the Kid

Billy the Kid you can’t hide out

inside yourself forever.

Beautiful

twisted killer,

shoot a man dead for looking at him wrong,

even a couple of women some said,

in cold twisted blood

as if the flat burning path of a bullet

straightened anything out.

Sheriff Pat Garrett gunned Billy down

on the dark porch of a bordertown cabin

where Billy, knife in hand,

had gone outside to slice a steak

from a hanging slab of venison,