I.
No winks and twirling pistols on Light Street,
just barflies with crooked smiles,
pelts on rusty majorette spikes
and a nervous look in her eyes
that maybe the blood isn't dried,
not even breaking into smirks as the cluster bombs exploded.
The politics of torch songs have gotten quite complicated while I was
away.
The bridal dress has turned into a habit.
There’s no William Powell as Topper Sterling
with his debonair brand of benevolent debauchery and kindly jaded
twinkling wit
or Carole Lombard the ferret-faced blonde with her gunsel in distress
repartee
for me, see, every night's still Gladys Knight night.
It’s even been a hard day’s Knight night
(it’s hard out here for a pip).
II.
“Persona management software is in the arsenal now of this man's army,” one of the candidates harrumphed triumphantly, like angelina jolie without the african babies and semi-retarded pretty-boy boyfriend, not a one of them has sold their mother into prostitution, not a one Sir Hemminghaws of Coeur d’Alene can keep from blurting out how to bring our value proposition to the table we must dot the i’s and cross the t’s and take a deep dive outside of the box to take it to the next level raise the bar close the gap and move the needle on the new normal navigating ambiguity so that we’re all on the same page onboarding low cost high impact sell and tell synergistic strategies of shared ownership sacrifice to socialize the message and institutionalize the paradigm shift – too mm mm good, the sound of one hand clapping, only a dialectical sophist would disagree, and we're all dialectical sophists now.
In my debate, gadabout gadfly the last democrat would wear a top hat, not sanctimonious blue, he’d miss details but swallow landscapes, he wouldn’t catastrophize suspicious male packages, but make the good feel good about evil and the evil feel good about good, say things like “kitty needs some milk” and “the cheaper the hood the gaudier the patter” and implore us to
“Never ever ever ever ever
Ever ever ever ever ever
Ever make the mistake
Of underestimating
The dangerous
Insanity
Of Bob Hope.”
III.
Holy cosmic transubstantiation Batman:
Six degrees of separation for this 33rd and a third degree mason,
the siddha musta fed me some bad fungus
or it was an ad hoc a la carte nip off the silkworm larva cart—
I didn’t keep my lotus powder dry
and all the mount meru mouthpieces work now for the other side.
It’s wake up in guyville on Guy Falkes day
with Goyas in the mist, goyim in our midst,
shoeless in gaza with the portable huzzahs
of heliocentric maniacs and orbital pan handlers,
the smell of bible black shoe leather in the morning
gaining agartha but losing your sole
for a cuppa shoeless joe,
the glimmering carnival too far off in the distance.
The plymouth has landed
but that's ok admiral byrds died like a soldier;
when the going gets encyclopedic, the encyclopedic glow.
“Abandon all hope” just as it all went black.
So this is death: Same. As. It. Ever. Was.
