Punk Uncle
Poets and punk rockers
age worse than pop rocks
and boxed wine
And I’m both
Que sera, say
fuck it
My resume might as well read:
Jack Off of All Trades
Master of Jack Shit
I can think of a lot
of worse things to be
but glory glory
this kind of living
is killing me
Hallelujah
I’ve seen friends hit it so big
it has splattered my clothes
like John F Kennedy’s brains,
back and to the left-out
pity party army of one
again
Maybe if I just stopped
shouting to/from/for/at all the
fringe’s reflections of me
I could be happy
but I am not bitter
You can ask any of my
guts dead butterflies
but all their brittle
little skeletons will tell you is:
At least we died for a reason
I’ve had
heartbreak/mis(sed)steps
a bloodstream moved
by error
I hold onto grudges
family/experiments
and lessons
I will
get Joy/grab Learning
bare knuckled/anywhere
I can get it
I may have less than some, but
I got a lot more than a lot
I am Hope’s
last motherfucker
Paulie Lipman is a former bartender/bouncer/record store employee/Renaissance Fair worker/two time National Poetry Slam finalist and a current loud Jewish/Queer/ poet/writer/performer. His work has appeared in the anthology We Will Be Shelter (Write Bloody Publishing) as well as The Emerson Review, Drunk In A Midnight Choir, Voicemail Poems, pressure gauge, and Prisma (Zeitblatt Fur Text & Sprache). You can follow him on Facebook.
Featured image by Henry Perks