I come home to find my cousin Todd
won't take his Lithium,
my mother has a tissue box
in every corner of her house
and nothing but a police scanner for company,
my sister's married to a man
who wears a hunting cap at dinner, and who drinks
a gallon of whole milk a day,
Kim Hecht has taken too many vacations
with the Rainbow People
and is now able to communicate with cats and marigolds,
Shelley Macintire is now a mad
drunken nurse who hates people and breaks
dinnerware at parties,
our old house is all grown up
with vines and mean-looking grasses
and there are cages of angry dogs behind the shed
where I opened my first nudie mag,
most of the good looking girls from high school
are a mess
and a couple of the homely ones
have found their own
and most of them have been divorced at least once,
the bridge is out down
by Johnson's Hollow
and the lake where I used to skinny dip
with Theresa Ozuna
has been drained,
there's a new road to my grandpa's old house
out in the woods,
but it still looks rough,
it still looks plenty rough back there.