Ha!

Mister, you could tie my arms to separate horses,
shoot your gun and holler “Ha!” and I believe
you could pull me straight apart and a fortune
would be all that’s left, foretelling a future,
or maybe it’d be a wish that poltergeists
around then shimmers fine away....

...some mystery life itself gave me knowledge to say...
I mean, you can talk about cars and auto parts stores
and how shopping malls grab and grab and grab,
all the internal combustion engine noise out our windows,
how some people buy jet plane tickets and go to France
while other people are just itching to chop someone’s head off,
and how there’s news but it don’t seem like news...more
like internal combustion engine noise, a noise we suffer through,
a noise we can’t do anything about, there whether or not
we push the on button, like my own ears aren’t what it’s all about,
...I mean, there’s all this stuff, and it feels like the walls of a well,
and there’s daylight and lightbulbs but when it comes time
for me to say what I want to say, I’ve got to holler
from a darkness, holler to a light that I think I made up.

I know full well now I’m going to die
and I never meant a thing,
but I like to think there’s an invisible snake inside
that’s been feeding off of me, off all I wanted
when I wanted what was right,
and this snake is big—
not angry, not a killer, just big—
and the minute I die, it slithers out of me.

What I try to holler
is where the snake goes.