Chicagoetry: Come Back To The Five And Dime Bag, Stu Levine, Stu Levine

COME BACK TO THE FIVE AND DIME BAG, STU LEVINE, STU LEVINE

Back, come back: you can blame it all on me.
I was wrong and I just can't live without you.

You are my Poster Boy! Lovely: the polished image
of suburban Caucasian
propriety. MY MAN!

Wide lawns, narrow blinds, freshly-washed SUVs
stocked with

Miley Cyrus DVDs.
Goddam! Sure: goddam the Pusher Man.

But where would we be
without me? And my single greatest ally:

American Moral Hypocrisy made voluptuously manifest
in Prohibition.

Whoop-whoo! Whoop-whoo!

I was 'round the State Capitol
when I saw it was a time for a change.
Backed a Democrat for Governor,
Judy Baar-T. screamed in vain.

Whoop-whoo! Whoop-whoo!

If you got bad news you wanna shake the blues,
when the day is done and you wanna run around . . .

Get the story, bag the babe,
close the deal, get it up.

Whoop-whoo! Whoop-whoo!

But keep it clean, maintain the superficial moral
sheen. After all, it's just you and Me.

Let's stay together!
Prohibition, fellas. Genius: keeps the cops lyin',

the children dyin'
and the mothers cryin'.

Whoop-whoo! Whoop-whoo!
Sixty-hour work weeks, internet porn freaks,

children who hate us,

wives who berate us: don't we DESERVE our PARTY?!
The War on Drugs sweeps the price under

the rug: after all, they're just inner-city
colored kids, miles away from our driveway.

No big

whoop . . .

-

J. J. Tindall is the Beachwood's poet-in-residence. He can reached at jjtindall@yahoo.com. Chicagoetry is an exclusive Beachwood collection-in-progress.