Well, I was rutting down in Austintown—
cathedrals shrunk to honky tonks; god grins
in Milky Ways, virgin blush and lightning bugs
as the band's bridge rides the riddled jangle
of electrified mandolin—when I heard you fall
from your man's embrace, and wish for me,
2500 miles from here, out in nowheresville.
Teach all lazy men a lesson? Drive girlfriends
jealous wet to their unfrequented loins?
Ring the civilization out of this life, prairie
squall from a dirty cowboy's red bandana?
How your legs weren't made for shopping,
your fingers don't need to crawl no more
in spinach greens and pasta dough,
your mouth has had its fill of words
and measuredness and the slow tick
of time in decisions small and brittle?
A man who throws your cat across the lawn,
pounds the door like he's about to knock it down,
and grabs your ass tight as footballs in fumble,
for a kiss that proves there's still such a thing
as shiny satans and shocking goatmen, lascivious
as pink fins on Cadillacs, sexy as rainy streets,
propelled so absolutely similar to Apollo rockets,
it can't just be coincidence. Summers, nude
and oiled on the Patios Galore lounger out back,
safe behind the eugenia hedge; city nights alone
at a chrome-lit bar waiting for your girlfriend;
and the unspeakable acts in your oldest dreams,
where you don't quite wake, don't quite leave,
but grab at it, a vintner trying to find the tail
end of an ocean mist wisking over grape fields—
wherever you found yourself free to imagine,
there I was, bad posture, three days of beard,
teeth crooked as old fence posts, hair wild
as a desert campfire, smiling in weaponry.
In an uncreative, passionless, locked-up world,
art is the train sound of a zipper, isn't it?
Refuge is the speed at which your back hits
the cushions, thighs now blank and available
as white paper for the maddest attic poets,
lips rising in the corners—give me scimitars!—
before we crush into the old world, the one before
calculation built anything but death & delay.
© John Kilroy