I would like to experience the  'poem that would tickle
> the fancy of the guys around the pick-up bed'. It would be interesting
> to see if your experience with being around the back of a pick-up is the
> same as mine. As you mention each brings his own past to the equation.
> Is your meaning of 'around the back of a pick-up' a stereo typical base
> line meaning or one of the many other possible real life groups.

Both.

Please
> offer BP a moment of fun with a poem.

Not much fun in this. One reason I stopped seriously writing 25 years ago
was that it was the hardest damn work I had ever done, much harder than the
house restoration work that was my day gig.

I haven't written any poetry for public consumption in all these years.
Just to see what would happen I decided to give it a shot, with a special
effort to make it far more accessible then are my private jottings, and,
also, without giving myself the luxury I once claimed of taking weeks, if
not months, to worry the thing to death. Here goes-

Pick-up Truck Congress

                "To talk...of cabbages and kings."

Soon, we ought to elbow up
Around the truck bed
As once we did when we decided
Not to tear the town apart
Over the stinking and chattering
                asphalt plant

        that some of us saw
        as the drains of Hell
        ready to pour brimstone
        into our old, pure river;

        that some of us saw
        as the means of escape
        from regretted youth,
        when gaining promised birthright,
        known from a thousand hours
        sitting before the demented screen,
        seemed only to need a mourner's
                                shroud
        draped over the only way out to
        the real world;

        that I saw as a survival of throbbing
        WPA landscapes,
        wondrous appearance in my exile
        in a spectral land much older
        than any accidental artifact
        of our current America,
        snuck inside the gates.


We powwowed then, the righteous
elders of the town,
an improbable senate of settlers
from five different planets
standing hip to hip with
God's own representatives
of the antediluvian Alna
and worked it out, that time
could not be pitied and ignored
as some of us wished,
but, also, that our old pure river
counted on us to protect it,
which we could
by setting reasonable terms,
demanding that the mawing machine
protect us and our river from itself.

Soon, we ought to hang around the
                truck bed,
peripatetic living room and town hall,
as we did after they found the body
with its three neat holes
down in Benny Brook,
and confirmed that the world
was trying to get inside the gates.

Soon, we can lean again, around the bed,
as we did once and were amused by Tyson,
                        hungry for ears,
and Austin told of nights as a club fighter
Frank talked about going to school with Joey Gammach
who almost had a shot at the middleweight crown,
and, programmed, chorus a nasal
        "I could have been a contender",
which showed our ages, didn't it?

Soon we can go out to the store yard
when the tyrant winter takes his hands
from off our throats, and words
                become unchoked,
and renew our vows as polyandrous grooms
married to a little town.

Bruce