Teeth Guards At Night

1.
Spend my final years dreaming hard

of a Mekong Delta kind of vacation,

rare and exotic, crawly green, but, no,

I’ll live Orlando faux, dead as tourists

who just want to see things they held

so lightly in postcards from moneyed

friends, relatives who got there first.

Maybe I want this Earth to seize me,

shake me into the final knowledge

of what the hell is going on here

as I depart new population figures

for years when I’m glad to leave

right about when the wars for water

go nuclear, and best of luck

finding any farms south of Oregon.

Goodbye Central Valley. It was good

to eat you. So long Ogallala Aquifer,

and welcome desert back to old

Midwest plains towns, gone to dust

and back again, because a lifetime

is all that our memory’s good fer.

You see an empty ocean in Monterey

and you think it’s blue period beautiful,

until someone tells you whales crowded

that bay so much their breath stunk up

the beach just 200 years forever ago.

Yes, I saw extinction; didn’t know it.

2.

So, I got nothing left to do but die.

But, I can’t help but feel I fail simply

by dying, as if everyone else alive won.

(Or do they cease to exist when I do?)

All I saw and almost saw I thought

would be mine, destined for me

because I’m the kind to die trying

in a backyard spaceshot, but now

I’m scared I spent the fuel on take-off

and risk pulling up lame...shatter

in the void like so much windshield.

You shoulda seen me in Super 8! ,

Heard me when I was young! Heart

of a gorilla, body of a fence post, face

stolen off a Dublin choirboy, eyes lit wild

with fireflies. “C’mon, peace! C’mon love

and sharing! Strap back in, we’re leaving

on my throw of the boosters switch, my

poems, the way I sail, will ride the seven

continents like an airplane shadow proves

flight to people staring at the same ground!”

Yes! Watch a smokeghost army pour out

of the fuselage to shove this brazen rocket

into a pinpoint of light! Loosen up, gravity!

That was then, my wallet filled with talk.

Now, a 55-year-old man waits, ironing

his pants quietly and without complaint,

the wife coiled on the couch, crying raw

slivers of sound from the lupus, human

voice shredded like so much cabbage

for cole slaw, living in alien life form

surely! Yet, still no space ship lands.

Movies unreel in blood red afterimage

on a burning retina. She’s Ingres nude,

wanton as a jailbird in an Oakland motel,

rising from the sheets like a flesh island

that Ulysses once glimpsed in fitful sleep

too gone from women to ever lie quiet,

because that’s the way she once was.

Made our stand here. Here changed.

3.

And these old hands carry memories

of this jerk’s neck who threatened it all,

or so it seemed, or I imagined, long

in drink, at a time I had enough future

left to matter. This guy in Marty’s Tavern

one night, Mr. Pettybone, told the reason

for all these roads, and how most men

assume they’ll go home each night.

But, Mr. Pettybone didn’t like that

not one bit, and he told stories

about the other roads built for me,

and now how I sit there, the center

of this world, with few roads traveled

the last 25 years, because, I guess,

I didn’t need them. Pettybone got beet

angry, “All those roads for you! Bars

and nightclubs, unlatched doors

to apartments over pools, lovely

women and cheap alcohol thrown

everywhere!” Customers had to pull

me off of him. Crazy guy, but he knew

men like a drunkard preacher, and

no one wants to consider how close

to awful they nearly could have been.

Life sometimes flickers ghostly light as

just something you maybe made up,

like witches who get it instantly but me

it takes 50 years. Could say a man died

and one man got born when I saw

my front door that night. “Still there,”

murmurred in briefest prayer. Ain’t seen

Mr. Pettybone since, but I wake each day

and check. Cause it’s still a hunter’s world

where you got the voice of where food

walks--asleep or awake--and when it’s you

about to be eaten some way somehow.

4.

Now, most all is dread, and our indifference

kills a poet each night, the way you can wash

the new car and kill a dolphin species. Nosferatu,

come, night black as a Mexican women’s hair,

while stars take the shape of cradles. Let me lay

my neck open for the wonder again, new creature,

as our regular inoculation of sadness prevents

the old kind of power, or we theorize as the clock

turns to syrup workday afternoons. Then, exhaustion

enters the bloodstream and even you hesitate

to bite! The poison in us will make you feel much

as angels must when they pluck dead baby souls

off drone missile shrapnel, peel a handsome man

from the barrel of his brother’s shotgun, slide one

woman’s soul up the blade of an angry man’s

deer knife. They call it soul shock, when God

Himself doesn’t do the killing, but still the angels

must collect. Otherwise, the dead make their way.

They don’t stay! Souls rain up and out. Angels relax,

unlike the tug to pull a big man off an electric chair.

You know it’s a bad world when angels complain

about all the heavy lifting, a world where each man

gets marred with little tombs for spine, stacked

catacombs for backbone, like a prosecutor who

first pictures his lips upon the rape victim, hands

upon her hips. And men who calculate advantage

brutish as a rain of trash can lids, whose pride

of ownership is skin disease (see it in their face),

men uncomfortable until numb, men made dull

from their muscle and size who fight each other

because what else is there? Ah, give me clothes

that hide me well. Send paychecks to the place

I love. Paint my face the color of a wall. Lifetime

being visible has failed. Eraser time has come.

The days you have to tell me when I’m home,

this rack of skin my hovel. Sunken species.

5.

In the old Pacific, perfect waves sublimated

all this--or was it just that I was young—

exploding against the outline of my body.

Meaning, the tide. Me, the moon. A pier

at Aliso now rises from the parking lot

to the wet sand line, torn off at the shore

7 years back, and I stand there, structure

of mostly memory. Yes, a monthly bill

now to forget. Bank withdrawals to one day

never know. And the grimy pocket calculator

I used to figure out my bills each month

will be on a table when someone claims it,

my fingerprints on the grey casing, then

puts it in a box that’s never opened again,

marked in broad black strokes, “Dad.”

Crazy how the best nightclubs make you long

for hell and family life is yelling each night

to turn off lights. One recurring dream is left.

I don’t know why: bottle rockets pounding

a butterscotch sky. Below, a guy who’ll live

it all again drives east on the 55. In awe.
I yell down a cloud cliff, struck like a gong
at the loud cold steel of my best advice,
"Hey, buddy! Wear teeth guards at night!"