Poem of the Day: Tom Traubert's Blues by Tom Waits

Tom Traubert’s Blues (Four Sheets to the Wind in Copenhagen)

Tom Waits

Wasted and wounded, it ain't what the moon did, I've got what I paid for now
See you tomorrow, hey Frank, can I borrow a couple of bucks from you
To go waltzing Mathilda, waltzing Mathilda,
You'll go waltzing Mathilda with me

I'm an innocent victim of a blinded alley
And I'm tired of all these soldiers here
No one speaks English, and everything's broken, and my Stacys are soaking wet
To go waltzing Mathilda, waltzing Mathilda,
You'll go waltzing Mathilda with me

Now the dogs are barking and the taxi cab's parking
A lot they can do for me
I begged you to stab me, you tore my shirt open,
And I'm down on my knees tonight
Old Bushmill's I staggered, you'd bury the dagger
In your silhouette window light go
To go waltzing Mathilda, waltzing Mathilda,
You'll go waltzing Mathilda with me

Now I lost my Saint Christopher now that I've kissed her
And the one-armed bandit knows
And the maverick Chinamen, and the cold-blooded signs,
And the girls down by the strip-tease shows, go
Waltzing Mathilda, waltzing Mathilda,
You'll go waltzing Mathilda with me

No, I don't want your sympathy, the fugitives say
That the streets aren't for dreaming now
And manslaughter dragnets and the ghosts that sell memories,
They want a piece of the action anyhow
Go waltzing Mathilda, waltzing Mathilda,
You'll go waltzing Mathilda with me

And you can ask any sailor, and the keys from the jailor,
And the old men in wheelchairs know
And Mathilda's the defendant, she killed about a hundred,
And she follows wherever you may go
Waltzing Mathilda, waltzing Mathilda,
You'll go waltzing Mathilda with me

And it's a battered old suitcase to a hotel someplace,
And a wound that will never heal
No prima donna, the perfume is on an
Old shirt that is stained with blood and whiskey
And goodnight to the street sweepers, the night watchmen flame keepers
And goodnight to Mathilda, too

Overread at Table 3: Notes from Underground Revisited

from NOTES FROM UNDERGROUND REVISITED

and then people are always asking why does God allow bad things to happen to good people and good things to happen to bad people and truly truly truly I say to you people! people! you don’t really understand and it’s gonna sound harsh and it’s gonna be harsh for you to hear but the simple truth simply stated is this:

it ain’t about good or bad.

not even a bit.

it’s about salvation.

yeah yeah now I know you’re all p’o’ed because you want to wear your salvation like a big ol’ football jersey to show the world that you play for the wining team, but it’s not about that either.   You accept Jesus, you’re saved.  BAM! You’re going to Heaven.  Hallelujah and all that jazz.

You being good is your football jersey.   Not your acceptance.  You waving that flag shows that you obey Him and by being happy by obeying Him, that let’s OTHER people want to wear that jersey and BAM! they come to Christ.

Now, all this stuff about bad things happening to good people and good things happening to bad people, that has nothing to do with your salvation, your relationship with God, and what you have to do with the gifts that He gives you.  All that other stuff is a direct result of what other people are doing with THEIR salvation (or lack of it), their relationship (or lack of it) with God, and what THEY are doing (or not) with the gifts that He has given them.

So, when it comes down to why does the good/bad etc happen, well, I kinda summarize it like this:

That’s life.

Life is shit.

Shit happens.

Poem of the Day: America 2014

America 2014

America I have given you 44 years and you are nothing.

America I’ve got 28 cents in my savings account and a nineteen-hundred-dollar a month mortgage.

America you ring with joy at watching the smiling faces of the moneyed lenders

tell me to make my pledge to NPR in my will.

America when I’m gone I will leave you nothing but the stain in my underwear.

America please let the border kids stay.

They came crawling through the desert on their knees, or by clinging to

to the hard rails of the Beast, rumbling through the furnace of a merciless Chihuahuan summer.

Now you keep them in dog cages in McAllen, and AM Hate Radio Fearmongers call these children

                diseased

                                call them

                illegal

                                call them

                drug mules

                                call them

                invaders

                                call them

                a flood.

America I still have not told you what Uncle Ronnie did to Archbishop Romero.

I took my son to a hospital to get a two-second x-ray of his hand to find out

why he’s only five-foot-three at the age of 14, and you

sent me a bill for two-thousand-six-hundred-eighty-three-dollars and fifty-one-cents.

America these are the same hospitals that

dump decrepit old white women out of moving cars in front of run-down clinics in Los Angeles.

These are the same hospitals that send the uninsured into the streets of Galveston

with tumors on their spine malignant enough to paralyze arms.

The same hospitals, dear America, that let Anna Brown die in a jail cell in St Louis,

when the emergency room could have stopped that blood clot from reaching her heart

with some aspirin and a tiny dose of humanity.

America I’m not naming names, but

Israel – really?

Saudi Arabia – really?

Are these the two allies you want when you try to call yourself a Christian nation?

America I choke myself silly, laughing daily at your absurdities,

that you wear like baubles around your fingers that dig

deep into my pockets and pull out my sensibilities.

America you are your governors stump speeches in your Baptist megachurches.

America you are the fading glacier of the Sierra Nevada

America you are the algae bloom in Lake Erie.

                Toledo can’t drink the water any more, turn ‘em over, they’re done.

America you are a hornet’s nest that kills pregnant women.

Your pets take selfies and then their owners fight over the copyright.

You let your husbands shoot their estranged wives in the face with a shotgun in

the early morning

in the parking lot of high schools

in your suburban suites.

America your factories have been converted into Ikeas,

America I think you have run out of ideas.

You are just not funny any more, and I want to cancel my subscription.

America do you hear me banging on my pot and my pan?

America can you see me through the stained-blood window in the mist of the dirty rain?

America will you please let me know the time and date when you plan to

blow the lid off the top of the last mountain?

I wanna take a picture, upload it to Instagram,

tell everyone: this wasn’t a wimper –

this baby went out with a bang. 

MR

2014-1211

Poem of the day: What the Businessman Said by Allison Cobb

the business
man I shook
hands with
drinking local
whiskey at the
party Christmas
winter I mean non
religious for the
green
group where
his wife
donates her
hours bought
just bought
an old Victorian cheaper
than a Craftsman in
one of Portland’s
oldest best said
cost the cost
of doing
business one
cost of
doing
business all of
life of costs
a cost the business
man made
exercise machines
in China for
the bodies of
Americans
to sweat upon
the muscles heart
and blood vessels
the lungs he said
they never
even counted
labor
costs the labor
lives so cheap it was
the metal minerals
the plastic
parts they had
to calculate the labor
lives so
cheap they didn’t
even count






















Copyright © 2014 by Allison Cobb. Used with permission of the author.










About This Poem






“The ‘Craftsman’ style of architecture grew out of the British Arts and Crafts Movement, which was a reaction against the Industrial Revolution’s devaluing of workers and individual craft. It also was a reaction against the opulence of Victorian style—and aimed at making well-designed homes available for the middle class.”
—Allison Cobb

Overheard at the Counter: Mrs. Gherulous tells about getting gas at 6am

I was getting almost done pumping gas, it was dark and I was the only person there, then an old shady car park to pump gas… then the guy tells me.. excuse me mem do you have any spare change for coffee… I can’t tell you how many things went in to my head but for some reason I was not afraid and I told this guy… go inside and get what you need…









So he did and got coffee I told him get some bread… so he did and I when inside and I pay for his food, as we were leaving he thank me several times and he said I do good deeds to other people 2 when I can… I told them not to worry about it and I told him to have a bless day and I don’t remember exactly what I said but was on this lines: God is with you pray when you can…

Overheard at Table 5: My Dad and the Dishwasher

"So my dad was putting all the dishes in the dishwasher and they still had all this crap stuck to 'em and I says 'Dad you know you gotta clean 'em off first' and my dad says, 'Why the hell I gotta clean 'em off first it's a dishWASHER not a dishwasher-UPPER-AFTER' and I tell him, That's just the way it works you gotta clean 'em off first.'

"So he says 'Well then that just means it's not doing it just we oughta just fire the damn thing.'  and that's my dad's answer to everything - if it ain't working, fire it.  So that's why I just told mom that dad wants to fire the dishwasher."

Poem of the Day: When the earth holds nothing

When the earth holds nothing
for you,
Life is full of empty boxes
        left on dusty shelves
in detached garages with tilted doors.

Walk down these streets,
stricken with
the silence brought on
by the oppressive weight of indecision.

Your dreams have fled,
in search of someone else's
night sky.

The trees drop their limbs
in a sullen hush,
and not even the neighbor's
dogs have the
strength to bark at
strangers
these days.

Purple sky
bloated,

you turn and walk back
toward the garage.

Time to dust off those damn
shelves,
time to straighten up that tilted door,
time to fill those boxes

with your words.

If the world holds nothing for you,
let the world know that
at the very least,
you hold something for the world.



MR 2014-1202