Cormorant

Pro wrestlers spoke the word,
and it was the coolest ever
to snap a pencil-necked geek
right there in the locker room,
with the mic in his face.
 
This is our food.
 
We slap it lightly along
with switches over mountains
to where we’ll dwell next,
careful to our bellies along the cliffs,
until the children come to dine one day
on all that we had marched,
and we had walked day and night
skeletons only. Embarrassed,
but still adults by height and weight and muscle,
we tell the children after the journey
to root for themselves.
 
We, who once put pyramids on Orion’s belt;
we, who raced motorcycles light to light
down Sunset until one of us couldn’t dodge a roadblock,
and hauled the dead into copters whenever we could,
whenever the enemy held up at the treeline;
we, who practiced kisses on our forearms,
pounded doors out of anger and humiliation,
and told the young in bars what they’re in for;
we, who live in magazines and satellites,
on jet propulsion and dammed up streams,
alcohol and misery; we, who have been everything
any of us ever imagined, and only this.
 
On the other end of this future,
the poet once held us breathless by a fire,
fiddlers once filled a smoky kitchen
with the drunken merry voice of DNA,
but there’s no waiting around any more,
no money in forests until they’re all cut down,
no value to roaming animals, so let’s just say it
in chorus: I got mine. In the end of reverence.
 
Nuclear in fear, a man’s ideas rise up only
in phallic dream…men, who cannot invent anything
but their cocks, because what else is there?
Women who cannot do other than coyly wait,
because the one they dream of never comes.
Bluff and boast, purr and shriek, rage and suffer.
The crooner punches the air, the showgirl
rolls her eyes at the MC’s jokes about her tits,
the comic really means it, no, really,
and the scientist turns all the drinking water into $20 bills
because he can. Extinction, and all manner of indecision.
We eat out of boredom, fuck out of duty, and drink
from the ache to be somebody else.
Theology of compliance, sacrament of failure.
 
A dog could bark better than this.
 
Let the poets once again rivet flight:
a test pilot, with the blue ignited eyes, grin
of moonlight and granite, heading for the deck
hard as a cormorant diving to a boil of fish,
Plan A and B have failed; there’s nothing left.
So he just wills the thing to fly. He sees ailerons
catching the hard air, he dreams fast of lift,
grips faith alone to jet him back into the stratosphere.
15 tons of steel bound for the idle clouds
is but one vision we could never let go of.
 
Let the poets send us out:
an old Alabama football coach slaps the helmets
of his boys as he walks through the locker room,
bringing their heart rates to 225 just by what he says,
a poetry of sorts, lunkheads charmed to ultraviolence,
“…in the physics of sentient beings, destination is
determination! Now, let’s go get them Badgers!”
 
In other words, in lovely words, in words that fly
as dead infant souls or deviant biker cupids, in all these words
rolled up and thrown against your door, in keys and keys
and keys and words and keys against the locks, gravity,
the circumference of the universe, your little bit of history,
your bedtime toy of disbelief: flight first began as fable, and
the world begins with the person who best dreams it.