folks who live here see him as just an ordinary bitter old drunk/ no different from any other walking dead man/ there are so many things he has to answer for/ like what does he really believe/ in/ if anything/ you won’t listen to this, but he believes in three things and only three things/ ribs and guns/ and coal/ his country is an island surrounded by other whiskey islands of hate and hypocrisy/ the carnival is almost done, the summer’s sun has fled for other fields/ his daddy was an ordinary drunk, too/ the old man would shoot a dog as soon as look at it/ not too many remember the daddy, but the son got bit with it like snakes/ lives in his own vomit/ there’s a roadside ditch that sings his name/ he did us all wrong and he was awake when he did it/ the cutting down to size, the spittle from his lips, the contention that we were lazy sons of bitches/ we deserved what we got/ every story has an arch/ and every story, every story has an ending/