WHO IS THIS THAT COMETH FROM EDOM
If this will comfort you
yes I do
those things too, start out for one
place and end up at
another,
run red lights for green, worry
about all sorts
of things, chaotic, unseen, taxes to pay
that haven't even arrived
in the mail, people getting killed or thrown
in jail, sirens going off
everywhere and when you call there's
no one at home so couldn't
it be them lying by the roadside somewhere
with choppers hovering
overhead? and yesterday, a beautiful
spring day in the high sixties,
I pay a rare trip to the library and the librarian
is wearing two sweaters, wool gloves,
and a toboggan,
muttering about the cold, so it can't be just
me, can it? maybe it's one
of those bacterial strains that started out simple
and wimpy, like something in a cut
finger but got
stronger every year, learning to love triple
antibiotics the way we
come to love spinach, mutating from the dead
now as some superkiller that can't
be stopped, and what the librarian has got,
what most of us have got
and don't know it, is a mutant invader that will
eventually
kill us all, but that doesn't bother you, I
know, I know, nothing
bothers you except that damned teenager that
murdered your aunt
and got away with it tried and sentenced as
a juvenile
and now (didn't you tell us, didn't you say
it would happen?) he's on
the loose again, stole somebody's Lincoln SUV
and kidnapped
somebody else and raped her and threw her out
on the Interstate
in a rainstorm just to watch the big rigs
knock her around and squish her up into mush,
but with you
it's all about aliens that have got into our brains
through little pellets
that strange well-dressed men injected under the skin
and hooked up with giant satellites
in orbit
that control our every action
and are constantly on the lookout
for weirdos
like that teenage murdering SOB in his stolen ATV,
running he thinks from the demons inside
only it's really radio transmissions
from space which is what happened (you say)
to Susan Hayward,
if the truth was known, and any number of other people
that seem perfectly sane most of the time
if they could only
get rid of the migraines and put in a normal
day's work without screaming,
but didn't you
hear what this guy in Russia said (if you can trust
anybody in Russia)
he said what we've got is coming from
somewhere else altogether,
what if it isn't a new thing at all, what if, all along,
it's been feline leukemia
and the veterinarians
have kept it a secret from the government
and everybody else because if the truth was to come out
they would have to do away
with all the cats in the world and suffer
the loss of over
half their annual income, so what
the authorities better ask themselves, if they
catch that teenage perp,
is did he ever own a cat and where is that animal now
but whatever you do
don't grill him with sodium pentothal, which was okay
in a simpler time, like in The Guns of Navarone, but which,
nowadays, in combination
with all these unknowns, poses a greater potential risk
than anthrax
or cold sores, take your pick
¤ ¤ ¤
THE NIGHT I AUDITIONED FOR KAZAN
it was at a dinner
to celebrate
the publication of his second
novel, but by the time
we were introduced I'd already
had more than my share
of bourbon, which gave me the courage
to say
that I hoped he would one day
put his fiction aside (good as it was, I lied)
and return to the theatre.
Gadge gave a sad smileand took both my hands in his,
rubbing the fingers
like a printer savoring vellum.
"Since talent is so often
the scar tissue over a wound," he said,
"a mouth like you got and fingers like those,
you could really be a contendah,
no shit, kiddo, you ever get a shot at a role
where they want you to sing, take it from me,
don't worry about a thing
just go down on your knees and blow."
