Obviously I have wasted my life
chasing poems rather than dollars,
and as any rugged man could guess,
I hold my copy of Above the River
in soft, effeminate hands.

Our Father who art in Heaven
let me hear his angels sing into
the distances of a long-ago afternoon,
and since then I haven’t cared
about anything but re-creating that tune
or starving in moth-eaten garb trying to,

a ridiculous hammerless Noah
building an ark out of words in a world
that doesn’t believe in words or the coming apocalypse.

Listen to the cowbells, I say,
and everyone thinks it’s a Christopher Walken reference.
They say poetry is horseshit, and I say yes,
but lit up by lightning so it blazes like gold.

It’s fool’s gold to them.
I can’t even buy a bronze butterfly
with my last royalty check,
but as Robert Graves said, “there is no money
in poetry, but neither is there poetry in money.”