Orange Rides Again

Me again, Orange Fitz, and again, ma just loved a bright orange sunset so she named me 'Orange.' Guess you already know my history, if you don't, I used to be a movie extra, now I'm just fucked, but I wanted to lay my poor grizzled old head on your gentle shoulder and fess up to what's been twisting my big, gangling balls. I'm a poet, god damn it, and I'm getting treated like an asshole. Let me tell you some of it.

I attended a poets conference down in Tulsa, and hooo-weeee, who the hell'd expect a group like that to suck eggs. I read some of my best work aloud, then sat back and took a moral drubbing at the hands and lungs of those rat-shitting snobs. Fucking near all the bastards insinuated, one way or another, that I wasn't on the same level as all them creeps. One asshole has an MFA, so naturally his poems about ferns in a pot are better than mine, usually about men kicking ass off a Harley. Then some turkey insists her work is on a high spiritual plane, and people like me are an Earth bound piece of shit. Good Christ, she had hair like a used Brillo. And then this guy actually stood up to say that he's doing terribly important work on behalf of Somalian gingevitis patients, which makes his poems better than mine no matter what words he shit out on eight by ten copy paper.

I been called a lot of things, in my time, and here I was being called a lesser mortal in room full of purported egalitarians. You guessed right if you said I have a burr up my ass.

All I got left is the words themselves. And a busted down Winnebago to live in, and a disgruntled ex-wife who knows a lot of ex-cons without much to lose, so I'm kinda on tinter hooks most of the time. All the old guard I grew up with is either elsewhere or dead,and there's nothing left to do with this sorry old life but compose the rhyming verses of me, biker, film extra, old fuck up with a dangerous woman in the wings. Of course, I'm hurt and angry with that poet conference, a man my size can hurt, same as you little pussies. I can see a fine sunset out the window of the Winnebago, I have my pen, paper, thoughts, consciousness and the right to walk around. Fuck them people in Tulsa.