Deja Vu

I cut up a small dead oak I saved for emergencies

Not far from the run down farm house

I rented for next to nothing

On the pig farm my brother-in-law, Erwin, managed.

The high that day was ten below.

It was during the time I refer to as

My Jack Daniel’s Winter

Some time in the eighties’

After trickle-down decimated the local farmers

So the big corporations could

Buy Wisconsin land on the cheap

And right wing wackos could set up in Tigerton

And recruit among the disenfranchised.

I cut the tree down with a chain saw

I was able to buy

By cashing in a thousand dollar life insurance policy

For seven hundred dollars,

I lived off food stamps,

Care packages of venison from my sister,

And a few dollars I made holding up

Squealing little pigs by their hind legs

So Erwin could castrate them

With an exzacto knife every other week or so.

By the time he sprayed the wound,

Set them down and handed me another pig,

They were already at the feed trough.

The pig money paid for the Jack

I drank mostly at the cold-house

Preparing for the eventual collapse

Of western civilization

With a friend I was going off the deep end with.

He kept going and eventually I moved,

And decades later it sounds like

They’re preaching trickle-down once more,

The right wing wackos are stirring again,

And it’s supposed to be really cold next week.