Southern Legitimacy Statement: I fear that my complete listing of southern legitimacy would crash the cosmos & petunias so I shall HENCEFORTHWITH condense – I was born a coal miner’s son in the coal hollers of southwestern Virginia & as a child my family like many poor Appalachians migrated to many states in search of work – we returned and I started my education in a three room wooden school with outhouses and a well pump I went off into the city Nashville to get my education and moved to suburban Washington DC where I call myself an Urban Hillbilly .
I call myself a GASP – Gay Alcoholic Southern Poet and write poetry & flash fiction & take lots of photographs as I meander the creeks and river banks searching for wild greens – mushrooms – pawpaws & other treats to forage and be consumed with my vegetables grown from the fertile southern soil.
THREE POEMS
APPALACHIAN LAMENTATIONS
Whiskey Haiku Lament
drinking cheap whiskey
drowning in this paper cup
dive motel hangover
Kudzu Lament
got laid off again
drank my last beer
from the six-pack
tossed it over the hill
that damn kudzu
creeps every night
swear one morning
gonna wake up & find
this old trailer & myself
strangled in its clutches
Miner’s Lament Haiku
black lung & coal dust
kudzu blowing in the night
opiated dawn
