Girls with Insurance

There are a thousand terrible names

one person can call another, and I have said them all.

All my memories begin a little bit confused,

but I was eighteen and standing on rotten carpet,

there were short-sleeve shirts on a chair, my brother

and I in a trailer parked at the edge of a cotton field,

Nicky and Kenny, two guys we worked with,

all of us for my dad, cutting some meth on a small table,

asking if we still wanted to go frog gigging.

These are the people that other people say

shouldn’t have free health care. These are the people

others say should just rot. Natural selection,

rubbish to the wind, worthless pieces of shit,

and on and on. The irony here is that they

don’t care about health care, anyway,

I was once at a demonstration of a poetry-writing machine. The thing had been fed, or uploaded with, or otherwise given, the words that constituted the complete works of Joseph Conrad, if I remember correctly, and it had some grammatical logic programmed in, such that phrases stayed phrased and were handled correctly, as such. What it did, when it did its thing, was churn out poetry, surreal cut-and-paste stuff, using only those words from Conrad, thus, if I remember correctly, maybe offering some inadvertent postcolonial critique or something, along with proving that poets were now obsolete and machines could take over even the most extreme of avant-garde jobs, like the scissoring task work of reformatting a shelf of Joseph Conrad paperbacks into a few chance-tumbled, parlor game lines. The exquisite corpse of human literary production was exposed for all to see. The horror, the horror, etc.