After Ten Years Away

I come home to find my cousin Todd

won't take his Lithium,

my mother has a tissue box

in every corner of her house

and nothing but a police scanner for company,

my sister's married to a man

who wears a hunting cap at dinner, and who drinks

a gallon of whole milk a day,

Kim Hecht has taken too many vacations

with the Rainbow People

and is now able to communicate with cats and marigolds,

Shelley Macintire is now a mad

drunken nurse who hates people and breaks

dinnerware at parties,

our old house is all grown up

with vines and mean-looking grasses

and there are cages of angry dogs behind the shed

where I opened my first nudie mag,

most of the good looking girls from high school

are a mess

and a couple of the homely ones

have found their own

and most of them have been divorced at least once,

the bridge is out down

by Johnson's Hollow

and the lake where I used to skinny dip

with Theresa Ozuna

has been drained,

there's a new road to my grandpa's old house

out in the woods,

but it still looks rough,

it still looks plenty rough back there.