subtext

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Parched

I can’t draw or play music
I can only say “excuse me”
and “beer” and “room with a bath”
in French and German and only
“beer” in Spanish in horrible accents
what I want is to live somewhere
else in another life another time
to drink Bordeaux in Paris and write
poems about love or women or
both along the banks of the Seine
instead I read and I read and I read
hundreds of poets for almost forty years
and scribble my rhyme-less laments
waiting for a beer in the Texas heat