TheBanyanTree: I got those Back In The Bardo Blues

[Mike Pingleton]

I once lived on Easter Island
and came down with a bad infection
from a piece of statue lodged inside my eye.

I was once a Mesopotamian
merchant who had the bleak misfortune
of falling off a camel on my head.

I've never lived with the Cherokee
or played a horn
in a symphony
I've never been a gay young blade
a priest who prayed
or a meter maid

I came back as a Russian peasant
who gave birth nearly every summer
to another Cossack kid close to Kirghiz.

Sixteen times I lived in China and
sixteen times my life in China was
never any different from the last.

I've never been a Cimmerian
a barbarian
a librarian
I never was a gypsy queen
a Philistine
or Jimmy Dean

I was once a baseball player,
my ticket punched to pitch in Pittsburgh
until that awkward step off of the train.