A Saturday poetry break

From One Beer Lover to Another

Once a month,
As predictable as the ore train
That used to run by his shack
Bushy Bill walks out of the Brockways
To cash the check he gets
From a grateful government
For falling drunk
Off a dee seven in Korea
Twenty years ago.
Moody, red eyed,
Smelling of wet newspapers in June
And fuel oil in winter
He goes to the A & P
And buys a months supply of Strohs
To be dropped off at his mailbox
On the Mill Road where he’ll
Pack them, one by patient one
Up to his tarpaper shack
Plastered with Playboy foldouts.
(i’d like to tell that
he’s writing the great american novel or
that he plays cool guitar in the michigan evenings or
discusses transcendentalism with a pet racoon, but, no
he just drinks his beer and pisses out the front door.)

        -- From Michael H. Johnson, Bottles in the Basement (Houghton, MI: Denim Press, 1972)