by Colin Dodds
The Wishy Regime
The wishy fellow locked in the bar—
that’s me
Couldn’t tell the angels from the inmates
Hate as strong as a haircut
and haircuts named after car crashes:
The pileup, the hit-and-run, the rear-ender, the sideswipe
Stray talk, like shit in my ears
Personality, personality
Drink, drink
A burden and an entertainment
There is no feeling here, but we demand sex
They fell we fell further still—
victims of the Peter Principle on the Pyramid of Needs
At its base,
the bottles all point to heaven
Maybe we do get what we want,
but what then?
Chez Jay
The nervous knee of the drunk next to me
makes it seem the great quake is upon us
A damaged man babbles to the tourists at the end of the bar
Australians filter in and out of the seats beside me,
incredible strangers in the airport land,
the valley of immortal cars, Santa Monica
I’m on vacation from trying to be special,
on vacation from vacation
No one asks me to explain myself,
but I spend all night trying nonetheless
Even in California, George Patton
and the tragic municipalities of Massachusetts
pursue me
Magic Still Rules Our Lives
In a private moment,
the framed picture in a quiet bar holds a famous face
and that calms you a little
The movie stars enable and ennoble
our drinks, our meals, our renting of rooms
help us believe that we,
the hamburger cattle of history’s most fantastic bottleneck,
could matter
The lights in the theater go down so we can see the stars,
the millionaires and billionaires, the white hot balls of attention
always on the verge of expansion or collapse,
thrashing through the wish-granting dream-life
of a sacrificial king
By the afternoon, the bloodthirsty gods
change their names and relocate into the traffic
Out on Venice Beach, the poison priesthood
sleeps curled or contorted on the grass and dream
of a still deadlier drug, one made of words,
For that, they pay, lingering by the eddies in traffic,
conspiring to get through the next five minutes,
dying for a better story to be sacrificed for
Up the road, the gym parking lots are full,
the machines occupied by bodies eager for purification
Farther still, office towers rise from the pressure
of decent, intelligent men and women desperate for initiation
By evening, the waiter with the perfect jaw
and the dancer with still-bright eyes,
arrive from their respective nowheres
for a shot at their own assumption
into the glowing cloud of trivia
The internet and a Cardinals’ College of economists
will not change the fact
that magic still rules our lives
A Renaissance Bronze at the Getty
Ill-used by illusion, by long weeks
as the creature in my press releases,
or the pornographic sports car my toiletries say I am,
a renaissance bronze, pensive and noble, active and fragile,
interrupts me with the urgency of an injury
and demands a tenderness I’d withdrawn
The frozen flexion of a thigh,
the way an index finger presses
into a puzzled cheek
Stops me, and invites the honest whisper
in my hair-trigger heart, which says
there is a free will inside my free will
The bronze figure wordlessly
urges me to permit
a full existence to my fellow man
And, with all the new people
that all the cheap food and cheap oil have allowed
what a test that has become!
No wonder the oil baron
chose a museum as the penance
for his massive existence
Into the Lightning
Venus haunts the summer before I marry
A bright, untwinkling speck in the empty city sky
Afternoons of library books and liquor
bleed into nights of drunkenness and dreams
The day is calm and clear
The bridge has a baseball player’s name
The sandbar holds its ground
The wind is not only at our faces
We just never notice when it’s at our backs
Despite the jetties, the beach has rearranged
into new crescent inlets and bulging prosceniums
from which we act out the dreams of the ocean
The ocean cannot understand and so must forgive
the naked men standing idly on the beach at sunset,
awaiting a rendezvous, or just wagging their dicks at the horizon
Night empties the beach
My sandy fingers dig through fishguts for more bait,
for an excuse to stay on the beach another hour
With Coney Island fireworks at my back,
clouds flashing over Nassau County to my left
and a gibbous moon before me,
I charge into the glimmering sky and rushing surf
and cast my line into the lightning
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