This is How You Get Sucked In

Into poetry? Me too. Nobody likes a good poem more than the Hammer household.

There once was an artist named Saint
Who swallowed some samples of paint
All shades of the spectrum
Flow out of his rectum
What a colorful lack of restraint!

Well, it seems there's much hubbub in the Old North State about our Republican Governor's choice of "Poet Laureate". What's that you say? What's a "poet laureate" and why do we need one? You must be kidding you uneducated p.o.s. redneck, of course we need a state poet and I'll tell you why...MORON! We need a Grand Master Poet Czar  for the very same reason we need a state flower or state color or state bird...because everybody else has one and Goddamnit we ain't getting left behind!

There once was a fellow McSweeny
Who spilled some gin on his weenie
Just to be couth
He added Vermouth
Then slipped his girlfriend a martini!

Anyway Gov. McCrory (a stupid ass Republican!) went out and appointed some self-published "poet" (I use the term loosely) by the name of Valerie Macon, and guess what? Our REAL poets ain't having none! Just who the hell ever heard of Valarie Macon anyway? She's obviously a tool of the right, why else would she be appointed? I'm sure she thinks she's Emily Dickinson (the stupid bitch) but we ain't impressed...besides she's not in "The Club". As you well know our past Mac Daddy poets have been household names. Who can forget Kathryn Stripling Byer or Cathy Smith Bowers (all women of importance have THREE names, preferably hyphenated). I don't know about you but when I think highbrow I 'm not thinking Tennyson, Dryden or Pope, I'm thinking Bowers! And to prove my point here's just a sample of the genius of Cathy (winner of the coveted Texas Tech Poetry Award).

I had a boyfriend once, after my mother 
and brothers and sisters and I 
fled my father’s house, who worked 
at the Piggly Wiggly where he stocked 
shelves on Fridays until midnight 
then drove to my house to sneak me out,
take me down to the tracks by the cotton mill
where he lifted me and the quilt I’d brought 
into an empty boxcar. All night 
the wild thunder of looms. The roar of trains 
passing on adjacent tracks hauling 
their difficult cargo, cotton bales 
or rolls of muslin on their way 
to the bleachery to be whitened, patterned 
into stripes and checks, into still-life gardens 
of wisteria and rose. And when the whistle 
signaled third shift free, he would lift me 
down again onto the gravel and take me home. 
If my mother ever knew she didn’t say, so glad 
in her new freedom, so grateful for the bags 
of damaged goods stolen from the stockroom 
and left on our kitchen table. Slashed 
bags of rice and beans he had bandaged
with masking tape, the labelless cans, 
the cereals and detergents in varying
stages of destruction. Plenty 
to get us through the week, and even some plums 
and cherries, tender and delicious, 
still whole inside the mutilated cans 
and floating in their own sweet juice.

BRILLIANT!