Everything in this poem seems to be avoiding the thing it finally says in its last line. It opens in the flattest voice available: "Don't see Susie Lake no more / Since she quit her job at the party store." The two lines rhyme, *more* and *store*, so for a moment we expect a neat, chatty ballad. The rhyme never returns. Even the party store is quietly ironic, a place built for celebrations, mentioned as a place someone has left. We learn nothing else about Susie Lake, and that missing information sets the tone: things disappear here, and nobody explains.
The next stanza turns sharply physical. "Black ink / And a razor" are the tools of someone who wants to remove a person from the record, to "cut you out of my history book." The verb is violent, but the replacement is sentimental: an angel "flying low in the shadows of tomorrow." It is the most conventionally poetic line in the poem, and it sounds slightly wrong. Angels are supposed to fly high, and "low" and "shadows" take away the comfort. The poem doesn't say who "you" is, or whether this person has died, left, or simply disappointed the speaker. The gesture matters more than the explanation. Erasing someone and consoling yourself with a pretty picture is shown as an act, and the poem doesn't trust it.
Then comes a memory, introduced by a cliché: "She told me the best things in life are free / As we hitchhiked alongside the 103." The road number gives the moment a hard edge of reality, and the proverb sounds more poignant when set beside two people with no ride. After that the poem slides into pure surrealism. A chicken puts out a burning food blender, as though poultry firefighting were routine. A cowboy appears with "a cleft pallet" (the spelling gives us a wooden platform rather than a palate, whether by design or slip) and "a cauliflower for a left ear." The cauliflower ear is a familiar expression turned literal. Throughout the poem, figures of speech become objects you could pick up.
That habit drives the longest section, the conversation between the cowboy and his boots. He confesses, "Your love for me / Has helped me see things inside myself," which is the language of therapy or a love song. The boots answer like a patient counsellor: "Mmm-hmm," "Yesssss," "Things like..." The joke is that "seeing inside myself" is taken anatomically. The cowboy's inner life turns out to be "My intestines," then "my trachea," then "my spleen," a list that gets more obscure as it goes. His last line, "Never seen a spleen before...", is funny because it is so lamely wonderstruck. Underneath the comedy is something sadder. The only listener the cowboy can be vulnerable with is a pair of boots, which cannot judge him, leave him, or die. I read that as an inference from the scene rather than anything the poem states, but the ellipses, with their hesitations and trailing silences, suggest how hard honest speech is.
Then the joke stops. "And sorrow was her baby" begins with "And," as if continuing a sentence we never heard. It is plain and unadorned, with no cowboy, no blender, no wink. Who "her" is remains open; it could be Susie, the "she" of the hitchhiking memory, or no one we've met. What the line does is set sorrow inside a family, as something carried, born, and raised. That echoes the title, which ranks death as "the enemy" and "your mother" as "runner's up." The title's joke about rivals turns tender in hindsight: this is a poem about the people and losses we are bound to.
Formally the poem is free verse with no fixed pattern. Its short lines work like comic timing, and its line breaks hold beats the way a stand-up pause does. Its interest lies in tonal whiplash, in how it swings between deadpan, violence, slapstick, and a sudden quiet. It suggests that grief doesn't arrive in one register. People cut portraits out, repeat proverbs, tell their boots about their organs, and only at the end say the simple thing.