Things Could Be Worse
Poem for John Prine
~for John Prine
Tonight all the televisions are exploding,
and Jesus Christ came back
just to flip the bird from his cloud.
It seems like most art is worthless
in a world where everything is free,
there’s a whole generation of children
who’ve never ridden in a railroad car,
but they’ve all known someone
who buried someone in a war.
Every headline these days
is enough to make you wish
you could throw the whole planet away,
maybe start over
with another version of the sky,
a moon with a bullet between its eyes,
its light on the river
like the sunshine in Kentucky
before the eastern mountains
were drilled full of holes.
Tonight the smiley faces
turned themselves upside-down,
I cut myself trying to wear
a broken bottle for a crown,
every song I heard
held the sadness of a thousand
train whistles roaring
out past the quarries,
I swear I could almost feel it,
that cold cave water
I dove in although I was scared.
Consider yourself lucky
if you ever had a friend
who asked you what it meant,
who stumbled with you drunk
through a hundred Saturday nights
before you knew
those Saturday nights would end,
remember when you said
things could always be worse,
John Prine could be dead
and people could pretend
the president of the United States
is as infallible as God.
_____________
This poem appears in this book.
