Famous to Goldenrod

Famous to Goldenrod

You're the girl
at the end of the bar
blowing smoke through your
missing teeth.
Bags piled up beside the stool,
Target,
A couple dime store sacks
filled with memories,
rags and scraps.

You're the girl
who grew up believing you
could be a singer
strumming that old flat top,
while your mom smoked hash
and applauded
heartily behind her Tarots.

You're the girl
who mastered the art of
flatpicking,
when you weren't on your knees,
before your stepdaddy's
Lazy Boy.
He rested his Schlitz
on your Doc Watson
songbook.
You sang East Virginia Blues
to yourself
as you learned to
please the hard way.

You're the girl,
Who danced through fields of goldenrod
and sumac,
singing your soul out
to deaf meadows.
You were too tall to hide,
so you played scarecrow
to your suitors;
all moths, drakes and daydreams.

Soon you'll be the woman,
With a liver
the size of
Minneapolis.
Jaundiced, rotten,
bereft
and alone.

Sucking on a Schlitz
at some Rest Stop
near Eugene,
grifting off hippies and
busking for enough
to keep Bacchus in your body.

In your mind you'll hear your mother
applauding
between wheezes,
but your stepdaddy's trousers
will haunt your undone dreams.

You'll gather sheaves beside the highway,
plastering Revlon
over cancers.
Scraping by on tips, bacon
sandwiches,
and one night stands--
all fat truckers
and wasted vagrants.

Some day you'll die grunting,
into a backed up toilet,
on a single wide trailer stage
just off Interstate 10.
A starving cat
mewing amidst the Bud cans,
stacks of cash hungry creditors,
the reek of piss, death,
and six white chips scattered
on shag.

No one mourns at state funerals my dear,
and Doc Watson died sober.

You're the girl,
who became ashes on the breeze.
A faint remembrance.
Famous to
goldenrod.