1. Adultolescence
Stingray do not so much swim
But shuttle through the petting channels
Of blue-concrete aquariums
Under the reaching hands
Of middle-class children. "Do you remember?"
Who quickly forget what a wonder it was
To be wounded in the knee,
And the birth memory, a white miracle,
Is getting ever foggier
As the Lamborghini fetish haunts
With salt-and-pepper patches
Growing around the temples,
Like mold on a strawberry,
Homeowners Association forms
In official manila envelopes,
A paperweight to hold the heart in place
Stabbed with a number-two pencil
To stop the beating. "Neither do I."
2. Holy Ambition
Pennies and nickels are scattered
In wishing wells, in the lobbies
Of five-star faux-French hotels
And shimmer under the pendulous ripples.
"Do you want to get together?"
3. Tell Your Mother I Said
"Neither do I." Year after year,
The crook bastards bank on the insatiable joneses,
In boardwalk shooting galleries,
They fashion newsboy caps
Prop the stuffed bears
In helpless postures. Trust me,
It looks good until you've got it.
My past conquests lean inward,
Look down non-specifically
At the tablecloth, the wax drips
From the candelabra, when they mention
My A-B personality, the maitre'd's
With napkins draped over their forearms
Eavesdrop the whodunit;
I am alone on a business trip at a Best Western
But in my head I am a gunslinger
In a B-movie shootout and capture-raid,
My imaginary conquests live in tabloid magazines,
And carefully crafted masturbation fantasies,
They can sense my after-hours invasion
Like the feeling of a tornado
Racing over the state line
4. Vow Renewal
But for safe-keeping our unspeakables
Are stashed inside the walls and ceiling;
In fact, you can hear their teeth gnawing
The framework when it rains. You pretend
And I pretend. But what was it like
To love and be young and dangerous?
1
Having been snow-blind since sawmill dawn
And nauseated by the shaky, sometimes
Gnawed and tortured stretches of road,
You have been awake for two days
And step off a Greyhound bus, barely cognizant,
Into the breadth and gloom and gray
Of a McDonald's in North Dakota
It's tough to imagine that the girls
Propped behind the registers, all asphalt-eyed,
Elbow-flab and lips like tripwires,
Have got anyplace else to go but here
2
And bootstraps, sure, that's what your father says,
Whose hard-on for money has stripped and sawed
His sense of compassion with sandpaper
And shaving razors, like the peeling
Of a third degree sun-burn. He says kindness
And wanting nothing in return for kindness
Must mean ulterior motives or ignorance,
Not the good of man glowing in an outstretched
And blooming palm. His brain
Is an eight cylinder engine block. His heart
Is a latch and deadbolt on every door,
Each lung is a goop of Silly Putty and tar,
An ashtray that comes down with cancer
And grows tobacco stalks when dumped
Into the cemetery lawn, who gives
The Earth emphysema, a hole in the throat
For heaving. Bootstraps? But who gave him
Those boots to begin with?
3
We don't conceive ourselves.
I was born through a smokestack,
On a bed of lit cigarettes, how about you?
4
How many cardboard cutouts of Shaquille O'Neal
Does one country need? Mommy says it's to inspire
The youth, but I don't want to be stiff cardboard
And paint anymore than she does,
Anymore than I already am.
5
I should just get rich mowing lawns.
What ever happened to the pudgy perpetually overjoyed
Milkmen of half-past four who tiptoed up the walk,
While you were snug in your bed?
The star-spangled banner sung soon after
To start the day's nationally syndicated programming
Cramming our brains
With moving pictures of cartoon death
6
The rotgut rat-gray film that hangs over
Every artifice in the factory towns
Outside Spokane, the white electric
Windmills milling by the dozen
Unchoreographed but conducting
Electric currents beautifully . . .
7
All my friends are stuck on antidepressants
Have been raped or tried to suffocate
Themselves with pillows, so then, is this
The freedom to be over-medicated?
The freedom to get raped
The freedom to jump in a hole
And wait for the wind
To push the dirt upon you?
8
His amputated arm
Not lifted to his heart
Not singing
The praises of America
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