Diane Wakoski

I was studying poetry with Nancy Steele at Oregon when she turned me on to Diane Wakoski and this hilarious poem, which I'm not sure is supposed to be intentionally funny. Maybe it's just funny to my neanderthalian instincts, or maybe Wakoski is a genius. Either way...


from Dancing on the Grave of a Son of a Bitch


God damn it,
at last I am going to dance on your grave,
old man;
you’ve stepped on my shadow once too often,
you’ve been unfaithful to me with other women,
women so cheap and insipid it psychs me out to think I might
ever
be put
in the same category with them;
you’ve left me alone so often that I might as well have been
a homesteader in Alaska
these past years;
and you’ve left me, thrown me out of your life
often enough
that I might as well be a newspaper,
differently discarded each day.
Now you’re gone for good
and I don’t know why
but your leaving actually made me as miserable
as an earthworm with no
earth,
but now I’ve crawled out of the ground where you stomped me
and I gradually stand taller and taller each
day.

(read the rest of the poem at Poetry Foundation)


TS