our prehistoric nomad ancestors
drank beer before learning to make bread,
settling down to village life only to grow
corn or barley for more beer!
such long-gone eras
somehow resembled my Friday night landings
bleary-eyed, being too tired to cook
after a long workweek,
mother’s bread recipe sitting silent in the index file,
making a dinner instead of two pints
Guinness at the Irish bar,
replete with B vitamins,
a boon of girlish iron and
lots of appetite-satisfying calories.
by the time the bar’s band started,
you’d find me singing
old songs of my predecessors,
weigh heigh and up she rises,
weigh heigh and up she rises,
weigh heigh and up she rises
earl-aye in the morning.
which some say is a pirate’s song,
repeated renditions burning up my “meal’s”
extra calories by night’s end.
heading home to sleep
on a feathery pillow,
dreaming of homelands I’d never visit,
rushing though centuries,
adrift with other rovers on a long boat under
a cock-eyed Chicago moon,
never gaining a “waisted” inch,
but neither traveling one nomadic mile
with the most adventurous on board
come earl-aye Saturday morning.
