Moxie

We chose him
. . . and agreed to love him,
and that all he said should be holy, profound.
(it is elegant, he is beguiling.)
And we fed him for his newest work
before he had written;
(we are his patrons, you see)
We, who might exhume some meaning
to within a full quarter-inch of true sense.
Who would trade our confidence like baseball cards.
Who arrive before breakfast
with our new contracts, drawn on the sky
in white letters
by seven bright painted planes
from the second world war.

He sent us photographs of the life
we were too dignified to live;
the one exception to the code
of unbridled arrogance we love to share;
who have set traps for each other
in the snow.

He was a prince
and perhaps he despised it,
though he never let on.
Maligning instead
the train wreck of truth in his head,

from the hi-def blue screens,
and those AOL streams

from the radio waves and the satellite beams
that we aim through the gates
of his east coast estate.

Who we've hung in our homes
like a plaster-cast Elvis
staring down at the world he condemns
in his Greek and his tarot; dissertations on crime,
dissecting James Joyce in savage quatrains that rhyme.

His privilege his curse
looking downtown, unblind
at my table and scissor legged chairs,
at the discount store rug on a peel and stick floor;
at the speakers which sit
on an vacant book shelf
and repeat the sad words to a lecture he gave
at the grave of the kind old ambassador’s son,
his companion, his paramour
from those beach combing days
by Jeruselum, Auschwitz,
from Woodstock and Rome.



And he says to beware of the light
on the portraits and busts in the hall;
from the smell of the sweat and colognes
of the Caesars and Titans and Stalins
who are the damned and the Delphi;
and from the axe and the shield; from the law
and the films and the books and the songs;
to distrust the glow of the sun and the moon,
the arrangement of stars and the red-lighted rooms.

‘Til we’ve learned to despise in our leisure
the scars and the blisters we nourish by day.
And we celebrate him to detest us,
providing him ink for his pen;
who withhold any praise or attention
for news that he's published again.

So he spits and he sings
with a sack on a stick
‘longside of a mile long factory road;
Like an ill behaved acolyte, done what he’s told
taking shots at the soldiers and tanks rolling past,
at the bright circus tents and the jails, schools and Parliments
at the prostitutes, crack-heads and corporate presidents,
at the cross-worded columnists, shamans and Bollywood stars;
at the New Agers, the hedgefunds and American Idols
in bright colored custom pimped cars;
the magniloquent jews, sanctimonious mullahs
and the restless hypochristians
at MD's without borders and bomb strapped kids with their orders;
as this whole fuckin' nightmare crawls by.

And for each there’s a word that he twists for us,
makes us see into the bleak and blessed waste.
A fable of hope that he pens for us
absent of glamour and taste.

And for this we hold hands and light candles
and we feed him with food off our plate;
in the rain he will take my umbrella
in my shame he restoreth my faith.

That I may feed my child in the bliss of sin
I will make a cursed saint of him.