I’m just a gypsy barnacle,
searching for a rock
to lie on, to die on,
as the water laps my days.
Encrusted on this old routine,
I spend my time alone and
thinking, "suction…suction."
How soon the moment comes
for me to loosen and get battered
is just another secret of the sun.
How warm this shell has been,
how cold the sea.
It’s a cold world, but the lights work
and the trains don’t run on time.
And there’s no hope but a taut rope
for a man not in his prime.
Four of ten men on a dark street
are just waiting on a crime.
Some will kill you for a quarter,
some’ll love you for a dime.
And I say charge it all to Jesus.
Put it on the master’s card.
He said to live a life of love,
but it’s just too damned hard.
Our visions of a world above
are cracked and bent and scarred.
So play your hand, dispatch, disband,
dispel and then discard.
My teeth were sent to outer space,
as part of some experiment with dogs
and several poker-playing cosmonauts.
Now I have a growing taste for Mars bars,
starfish,moon pies, sun drieds and plutonium,
which tastes like Tang. An old NASA joke.
At night I feel them orbiting my bed
and in my head they vibrate,
conditioned by their mission.
When I smile, some people call me "lunar"
or "mercurial." But just a few White Russians
and I’m flush for liftoff, re-entry and splashdown
in the dental sea of tranquility.
He’s cornered the bullshit market,
eating Denver mints
and popping pesos madly.
He’s in love with the ruble,
and makes origami wallets
out of thousand dollar bills.
He collects sand dollars,
in case Atlantis rises.
He calls his mother "Drachma."
He takes no Canadian quarter,
and calls the lira lyrical.
He cries out wildly
during stock reports,
and sleeps upon a mattress
stuffed hard with confederate bills.
His banker calls him Big Bill,
but around the office
he’s just known as Buck.
Brendan hucked up a golf ball
he’d swallowed several years ago
after his only hole-in-one.
It was a point of honor,
his threesome insisted.
How was he to know they were insane?
Now at least there’s something
for his trophy cabinet,
even though the cover
of his Titleist is gone,
done in, he supposed, by stomach acids.
Didn’t even look like a golf ball
any more, just a frayed pellet
of wound elastics.
And what was it they’d done to him
in the trap on the very next hole?
He remembered thinking,
"Why, they all have tweezers!"
I shot the night
into ragged quarters,
through a Mexican-Russian
standoff; singing
dirty songs of earthworms
and potatoes, unsteady,
alas, on amped feet,
and playing air guitar
for the ghost outside
the window.