Texas author and poet Jo VonBargen

---

Otis Redding:
"oh, I've been loving yoooo ooo ooo"

hey, peeps, chill...
here in the woods it's just us

shhh, listen...
"just a little too long"

man oh man...that voice goes all over me...

oh, c'mon...I'm not all that

I'm just a two-bit bard in a two-bit town 
with two bits of wit

"I don't wanna stop now..."

naw...I don't care about fame...I just write

Argue lofty intellectual points with 
the prick pundits...who cares?
I damned well get the big picture, though, 
with my sieve of a brain...not that 
it matters

Fifty years from now what they thought
what I thought
what anybody thought
will just be cow plops in the flower bed

somebody throw a log
on the fire, huh?

look...
I just want us to sit here
on this moldering stump of a
crumbling log and light up a poem
in the smoldering dark,

pass it around
hold...
hold...
hold back the inevitable 
one more night

...just handsful of dust
waitin' on day and
the whirlwind

--Jo VonBargen 2011