Look at you darlin’, you’re worn out,
pushed and pulled this way and that,
numbed by the screen in the maddening
cubicle of a tethered life.
You’re tired of the limp conversations
with your half-baked generation.
Seems they’re bringing you down,
darlin’, so low that you can’t feel
the flow of your own blood
gushing around.
Your days are rushed and
mechanical. The algorithms
of the daily grind have
you all figured out. You’re
losing that fire, darlin’,
that sense of being madly alive.
I can see it in your exotic eyes,
the way you move, the way
you talk, the way you sigh
when the alarm clock cries
in the early AM.
I know a place that’ll help shake you out of it.
It’s a peculiar place for the exiled, for those
who crave a different taste than the stale
monotony of the typical American life.
We’re gonna descend on down to
a place of poets, and villains,
vagabonds, assassins, and gamblers,
drunkards, artists, pirates,
prophets, and midnight amblers.
BY RAYMOND CARVER
Poetic Outlaws 