Hate the sin
Once I rented a room
in a house in St. Paul
from a lady
named Madge
who used to bang on the radiator
with her shoe
when I came home drunk
late at night, after playing cards
with guys from the Pioneer Press
I’d turn up my radio
tuned to the country station
and play Ferlin Husky
at full volume
at 4:30 AM
bang, bang comes the shoe
“Keep it down Cowboy” she shouts
next day she’d squeeze
fresh grapefruit juice
and put it in front of me
with black coffee
and a fried egg
and toast with orange marmalade jam
and she’d ask if I’d met any nice girls last night
and I’d say no, just
card drunks
daytime reporters
nightime gamblers
a fallen preacher
and an old curmudgeon
named Stew
who hasn’t held a job in twenty years
who hasn’t changed his shirt in three weeks
and is easily angered
and becomes profane when provoked
and was recently arrested in Albert Lea
on charges of one hundred sixteen
parking violations
but who’s on a hot poker run
Madge says you hate the sin
but love the sinner
she wishes me well on my new job
selling vacuum cleaners door to door.
Ed's end of the planet books 
A large part of what interests me about you poems is that they speak about people who might be considered to be on the margins of what most folks think of as middle of the road, traditional society, although your characters don’t seem to think of themselves in these terms. They just do what they do; what they’ve always done and live life at the bone with a raw kind of honesty.
Thank you for your thoughts on this, Pete. While my poems are not always autobiographical, most of them reflect people and events that are in some way factual. They are about people I have known, or things I have done. I am not an eloquent poet, although I have tried to be.
That’s an interesting question–the idea of a poet being eloquent. For t6he hell of it I looked up the definition of eloquent. Webster defines the word as meaning “a discourse marked by force and persuasiveness” So I’m thinking that a poet should not be out to be forceful or persuasive but to speak of what is in a way which goes to deepening understanding or looking at what is with a different perspective.. In this sense eloquence would obliterate the poetic. . .