Pig's Head Blues
There comes a break in the wall of secrecy
where the maggoty off-white of past pokes out
its head, a stain on the nation’s teeth.
It’s Mr. Minister’s gilt-rust tongue, his mid-life
wasted youth. It’s how I can’t be all about
the first or last straw, how I tell myself to eat
it up, stare them down, hard as a salt-pillar wife.
The future smoking like a signal. He made my eyes pop out,
my skin fluoresce, my body write itself into a punchline.
At first it made me beautiful, but I digress.
These days the cameras follow me round town,
drunk on disgrace. My husband lies and says it’s fine.
He says he’d never burn a fifty, never smoke dope
in a shuttered bathroom, never persecute. He says
I mustn’t confess to anything; it’s for the best, babe,
that they don’t find out. He’d never cut off all our
life support; he’d never ruin a restaurant with champagne.
There comes a break in the wall of secrecy
where the maggoty off-white of past pokes out
its head, a stain on the nation’s teeth.
It’s Mr. Minister’s gilt-rust tongue, his mid-life
wasted youth. It’s how I can’t be all about
the first or last straw, how I tell myself to eat
it up, stare them down, hard as a salt-pillar wife.
The future smoking like a signal. He made my eyes pop out,
my skin fluoresce, my body write itself into a punchline.
At first it made me beautiful, but I digress.
These days the cameras follow me round town,
drunk on disgrace. My husband lies and says it’s fine.
He says he’d never burn a fifty, never smoke dope
in a shuttered bathroom, never persecute. He says
I mustn’t confess to anything; it’s for the best, babe,
that they don’t find out. He’d never cut off all our
life support; he’d never ruin a restaurant with champagne.