For old Billy Dugan, shot in the ass in the Civil War, my father said. <br /> <br />The old wound in my ass <br />has opened up again, but I <br />am past the prodigies <br />of youth’s campaigns, and weep <br />where I used to laugh <br />in war’s red humors, half <br />in love with silly-assed pains <br />and half not feeling them. <br />I have to sit up with <br />an indoor unsittable itch <br />before I go down late <br />and weeping to the storm- <br />cellar on a dirty night <br />and go to bed with the worms. <br />So pull the dirt up over me <br />and make a family joke <br />for Old Billy Blue Balls, <br />the oldest private in the world <br />with two ass-holes and no <br />place more to go to for a laugh <br />except the last one. Say: <br />The North won the Civil War <br />without much help from me <br />although I wear a proof <br />of the war’s obscenity.<br /><br />Alan Dugan<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/fabrication-of-ancestors/
