fishing

to Mike Foley

I am trying to slip sidewise
into this unwritten poem,
I am a sliver of a person
lodged in the palm of the bar,
surrounded by fidgeting fingers,
loquacious drunks, befuddled by
the intensity of the guy adjacent -
a man who provokes conversation
so that he can use the word "I"
as much as possible,
as though that ninth letter
at some indiscernible point in the past
became totemic,
and I keep slipping obliquely,
jarred by this man's insistent,
repeating narrative of
a missing tooth -
and they say when (within a dream)
a tooth goes missing
it means you're afraid of abandonment,
as though a part of you
has mysteriously & without reason,
politely & bloodlessly,
seceded overnight -
just like this damned poem,
a silvery flash under dark waters
(and me without a creel or even
a serviceable line, pun intended)
all I have is this wriggling worm,
too fleshy and insistent,
desperate not to be used,
so alien against
the iridescence of my palm -

the drunk asked me what i was writing & i said "amores perros."

she asked him politely to stop. he did not. she asked him again, and still he did not. a third time & the din & hum of the bar and its concourse. she fixed him in ice and he writhed within her constraints. almost enjoyed the bondage of it. when she eventually turns away (as they always do) he feels a deeper chill, one that ossifies the blood in his veins. he orders another beer & another shot of tequila. the scathe of the booze riots without recourse, metastasizing through the empire of his circulatory system -

some spleen

the night's sullen candor,
purpled & inveterate.

1.
irascible moon, high &
lofty, powdering its face
just to disdain its suitours.
how proud! how haughty!
she tilts her face to the sky,
uses it for a mirror -

2.
manic sun,
halitosic on the streets below.
teeth long since rotted out.
vibrates in the heat-static of the sky,
spits & convulses
like an apoplectic madman -

3.
the white capillaries
of lightning snake across
the gray cheeks
of the bulbous clouds;
thunder provides the soundtrack
to their rhexis

4.
the wind:
a hundred invisible strangers
rushing importantly by -
fearful, frustrated, unconcerned,
solipsistic -

& the philosopher-drunks
all imitating Diogenes,
frothing at the mouth,
inventing new dances
on their sojourns from one bar
to the next -
from tango to dervish

5.
and,
inevitably,
the brontolalia
of blood rushing in the ears,
the insistent rhythm of the heart
seizing dominion over the head -

(a coup de tete!)

- & again!
the vulcanized needle of lightning,
sewing up the skin of everything
with its effulgency,
disdaining the gray hush
of dusk & dim,
yet despite,

"luxe, calme, et volupté"
a half-second later.