wandering hillbilly

ole ritin of buddy don:
a few pomes writ while me n emily wuz in west germany 

durin our year in west germany, i tride lack crazy to git a nuther novel goin. i still have a few notebooks full of the scribblin i wuz a'doin. dont seem to me lack thays much of innythang wurth keepin in em. thang is, i also scribbled down sum pomes, witch at the time i dint thank nuthin of em, but now they look bettern mos innythang else i writ in them days.

heres one:

To build a fire in the heart hot enough
To burn whatever else was in it,
Set it near another heart
And let it yearn.

But do not let it touch: keep separate
The hearts.

And each will burn.

heres a nuthern:

Trading mute promises for spoken lies
She smiles
And whiles away her time
Pretends a love and plays the mime 

He waits
He waits until her polish dries.

thisn makes three:

Each day at four he takes the Nile
Down to his office where
His servants carve a giant smile
To paste
Upon his sad white face.

His wife can only see it upside down:
She sees him locked inside a narrow frown.
But he feels wider than the Aswan Dam,
And when they ask his name, he says, "I am."

n thisn makes a nuff fer today:

She yearns to touch him with her gentle hands
To reach him with her hopeful heart
But she gets burned
And turns
To her good friend—who takes her part,
And helps her as she calculates the sands
That spill when statues fall apart.