The beer lubricated bitter barang
Unshaven, gap toothed
His face grooved by scars of incipient senility
Spews forth from his alcoholic mumbling mouth
Misogynistic vituperations
That fill the air
With sulfuric jeremiads
Blistering all ears
He speaks vehemently of all the vengeance he will wreak
On every Khmer girl who did him wrong
Who robbed or lied or cheated
Or asked for too much money
To lay with him awhile
To stave of the dread
Of fast approaching mortality.
His litany of grievances is long
He has enumerated and memorialized
Every affliction or betrayal
Creating an inteminable , monotonous threnody
He intones the bitter litany
Ceaselessly
Echoed astringently
By the tipsy chorus of caviling whines
From all the other barang here
The senescent chorus of superannuated vampires
Who never admit their culpability
For being bamboozled so easily
Enraptured by the golden
Much used flesh
Of the taxi girl sorority
Ah how he regrets
That he allowed such obvious duplicity!
Like an animal he writhes entrapped
In the quagmire of his lubricity
Shackled to the spiked wheel
Of never ending desires
Captive to impropriety
Ensnared by yearning for youthful flesh
That false soma of immortality
That never does reprieve him from
Becoming just another hackneyed trope
A cliched calamity
Another avoidable fatality.
-Michael Murray
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