My Two Cents—New Murfin Verse

 

No getting around the crap. 

  

My Two Cents

October 14, 2016

Ok, so I’m a stranger to locker rooms.

I was the furthest thing from a jock,

            a pasty flabby kid with glasses

            and a paperback perpetually

            stuffed in his back pocket.

In rancid and sweaty after-gym class

            dodging the snapped towels

            and hoots at my terror shriveled wanger,

            I recall no chatting about grabbing pussy

            or sticking lounges down startled throats.

But hell, it was a long time ago,

            perhaps the memory is hazy

            or perhaps I lacked the passport

            to the elite spaces of strutting stars

            where such things maybe were lingua franca.

But I was an accredited correspondent

            to the sexual revolution

            even if a failed participant

            and remember free love and hippy chicks.

I did doctorial research in scurvy dives

            with the 7 am eye-opener drunks

            and the reek of stale beer, vomit, and Pall Malls

            and snickered along with some dirty jokes

            and ogled the unattainable babes on the

            beer calendars and TV shows

            flickering in the high corner above the cooler.

I have spent my hours with men

            on oily shop floors where machines

            whirred, roared, and clanked

            and you counted your fingers

            to make sure they were attached

            and we ate lunch off the roach coach

            brushing crumbs from our aprons

            and spun foolish yarns and lies.

I have languished in the Joint

            where a commissary Hustler

            was worth a carton of squares

            and drifted to sleep on lumpy cots

            to the moans of cons pulling their puds,

            my hand in unison with the rest.

I have been in the company of men

            where civilizing women were

            nowhere around to shame or constrain us.

I have heard and said fucked up things—

            but I never heard that sneering, swaggering

            unashamed boast of being a—

            let’s not pull punches—a predator

            or the bland assumption that any other man

            would be impressed and approving.

            I have never laid a hand or tongue on a woman

                        who was not willing to accept

                        my fumbling advances—

                        hell, most of the time I was too shy

                        or too terrified to act when they practically

                        sent up flares of invitation.

            I may be a pig and a loser, Mr. Trump,

                        but I have never disgraced all swine

                        or turned winner into an epithet.

—Patrick Murfin