and then damn fame

i watched the shooting stars

falling thru the western sky

crawling on my knees

trying to catch an escaping guy

who stole my emergency money

and all i can hear is you

calling me your special honey

but your sitting on my face

trying to get another random taste

of who i might have been

before the papers screamed my name

and then damn fame

spoiled how i combed my frilly hair.

i couldn't walk down the midway of the country fair

without getting thumbed and bummed

or rubbed and hitched and bitched and spun around

tossed like warm spaghetti and run to higher ground

by a charging elephant and her helpless trainer

who looked a lot like my fourth wife but tamer

she was running in place

with cotton candy stuck on her face

she held a ticket to ride in her clenched hand

she tried to speak but whatever it was 

was drowned out by a circus band

and i don't know how the elephant knew

but i saw it pack its' bags,

remove the hang tags

from a fresh set of clothes and grab a cab,

sharing the fare with an escaping Chesapeake blue crab.

they went down to the waiting harbor boats

looking for anything that floats

but when they hit the docks,

they picked all the locks

and fled the scene

in an old cuban cigar

painted to resemble a 1950's American classic car:

it smoked and they choked

but made a lot of money selling tobacco to the highway men

recently released from the Florida State Pen

i heard that they retired to a gambling joint on the lower Gulf coast

counting their luck while eating French quarter toast

all the while i waited for a visa to a foreign country and a new name

and then damn fame

grabbed me by the ears

and turned me into an elephant

who could handle a night of drinking free beers

i got good at dodging the natives tossing spears

sometimes studying a list of possible careers

but never choosing one.