If there’s luck anymore I’ll crash slack in the sea,
Fall drunkenly like a kite without string,
Where I’ll settle with other wet angry things
To be loved by the ologist
Through glass inches, at last.

Edelweiss Cafe, Grill Room, 1915

I can hear that river swell
No matter how hot I keep the grill;
I swear it roars over the soft goddamns
Out cracked mug grins
That the diners flash so quick.

One day that creek will rise ten feet,
Come like Austin’s rig
In reverse instead of drive,
And the Keno gals’ hair
Won’t seem so blue
Floating from the wrinkled heads
Of the losingest mermaids alive.

I can already see them spinning loose,
Weightless like the place was flipped,
And as they turn with knives and plates
I howl without a noise.

What I still have is the anger
For Kenny Stults,
The one I hated the most already,
When he dropped our pet
From the roof of the gym,
Shouting “Turtles can fly,”
While he proved that they couldn’t.

Maybe someday, instead of laying
Stiff on my back while my life falls out,
The winds will shift and I’ll soar for a bit
Grasping wildly with fingers like wings.

“Pourquoi, Jef?”
“On m’a payé pour cà.”
–Le Samouraï (1967)

If I were to raise a hero
I’d say, “Always get the money first,”
Make sure he learns the weight of bills
Before he ever lifts a piece.

And if he asks about women,
My answer would be
I don’t know,
Don’t make it all about your loss
Or her your passive savior.

The only lesson after that
I’ll shout to my dying child,
Deaf to me on screen,
Who’ll ask me where he left the script
When he performs it flawlessly.

Under fur the larval dance,
Ebb of flesh and flow of flies, that jive
That mocks the lunar waltz
For its constant measured fall. And all

Of it, even capped stalks
That look to be of Martian spore,
We then knew were not of the heavens
But children of a selfish germ. So squirm

My brothers, writhe and eat,
Flow like kudzu from open veins; your stains
Will prove matter in hungry states
To be a thing of malice, become things of grace.

He issues a belch
That would shatter
Windows were he still a boy,
But comes now as a wheeze
Demanding a drink, a girl
Some anything to scale at least.

The Wobblies say he was striking;
“Our first member,” so goes the story.
Others, that next,
He cleaved us a great river,
“For to dam,
For to help us stand taller.”

But Bunyan looks once at Columbia
And spits, much too far, missing
A shot anybody’s
Brother would make
And Bunyan sobs like the sky’s pissing.

How confident they looked back then,
So sure that the years were theirs,
That words were just a simple thing
Like grass
Walked through in dungarees.

How few busts one sees
Of statesmen toothless old
And creased,

Or even young
But looking low,
Uncertain of what comes next and when,
But mostly if,
And mostly when.