A World In Which Nearly Everybody Wants To Be A Millionaire Poem by Ted Sheridan

He grew up wanting to be a hobo and ride the trains
With names like the Powhatan and the Pocahontas
The old trains provided a familiarity to his dreams
The click clacking sounds of steel meeting steel
Of wheels meeting tracks
The familiar comfort of never looking back
To the escape he took from his warm and cozy childhood bed
He grew up wanting to be a hobo and preferred to sleep in stockyards
Where the smell of cattle covered the stench of wealth
Even if it was just a metaphor composed of methane gas
Bovines are apathetic and don’t care about human politics
They accept their fate at the end of an electronic prod
Better to accept one’s fate than fight it he always believed
Better to grow a beard than to shave a daily growth of lies
Better to sleep with flies than to be one
Buzzing with dirty gossip and eating crap for meals
At least beans in a can were nutritious
And he could practically steal them for free…
He grew up wanting to be a hobo and ride the trains
Iowa and Ohio
Pennsylvania and New York
All the places he could travel incognito
And nobody would ever know how wealthy he really was…