Southern Comfort

While cleaning up my jump drive, I came across this poem I wrote several years ago back in college...still love it though.

Southern Comfort

As the jukebox belches out classic country songs,

Dolly, Willie, and Waylon crooning about

Louisiana women, Mississippi men and the

folks down in Luchenbach, Texas,

the pretty young lass crouches on her

bar stool, afraid to make eye contact

with the rough riding motorcycle men who

frequently inhabit the saloon,

but not often enough for them to acquire

the stigma of an alcoholic, branded on

their skin like the bald eagle tattoos

plastered across their sweaty, hairy

backs and chests and bellies, bodies

that have endured years of the cruel sun,

tanning their skin until it’s leather like,

bodies that scare off most women but

attract the butch women, who they

themselves sport similar tattoos, but of a

more feminine nature like the bleeding

red rose usually located on a shin

or a shoulder or the broken heart that

has currently become the principle of many

stereotypes and beer commercials that

strongly resemble the situation in which the

young girl, drinking a PBR and taking a

long pull from an extended Marlboro Red,

has currently discovered herself, and

through the creamy tendrils her cigarette

stub has left lingering in the ashtray,

she wonders how she’s walked from so-called

reality and stumbled straight into a

Southwestern cliché.