YOU GROW UP CROOKED

You grow up crooked in rural Texas.
You hear "pretty is is pretty does"
but wake up with a headache
from the wire rollers your mama
stuck all over your head.
You take off all your clothes
when you are four
and swim in a mud puddle
then wake up when you are eight
in a baptistry
because Love Lifted Me
because Old Rugged Cross
because his truth
is marching on
(do lord oh do lord oh do remember me).
It isn't Texas gothic at all.
It ain't Southern gothic.
It isn't Carson McCullers
or Truman Capote
or Tennessee Williams
or goddamn Dorothy Allison.
It's business as usual in Wise County
and all of us have fallen short
of The Glory of God
but let's go to Dairy Queen for sundaes and gossip
then go to sleep like the Waltons
all snug and crazy
up in each other's business.
Once I twirled a baton.
Once my drunk grandfather held me in an RV as he sobbed
and I looked out the window and saw a Frito Lay truck and said,
"This will be over soon."
"It's never really over. It's just over there." (Carrie Fisher)
Next thing you know
you are forty
waking up in a tub in The Holly Inn
in Eagle Pass
and you reek of Jack Daniels vomit
but the strange man in the bed
likes you enough to fuck you
and take you to Chili's for dessert.
Billy Pilgrim never had it so good.
Each day a bead
fingered but not counted
on a much mistier
planet.