Even A Beach Bum Poet Is Too Satisfied For Greatness
Paul Cordeiro
He says the old ladies love it best
when he tosses the gulls table scraps
and sometimes God thunderclaps in awe
at such acrobatics that the sea tumbles seaweed
and the old ball we're on rolls along toward
the sun as everyone goes home happier and wiser.
Those that fight madness and live for rougher places
head for the tattoo parlors, strip joints, bars, and the neon lights.
The desperate meet there, then, go down to mingle molecules
on the terraces and the smooth darkened beach,
and to ease the squeeze of the octopus around the heart.
He leaves these unwise to haunt themselves
and doesn't chase the leftover women in bars either
who act like drugged whores in search of a fix.
He says, you need to import friends down here,
and keep to yourself, because the transplanted natives are icier
than dead fish, stiff as preachers, closed down as the statues
of Confederate generals unbowed in their loser's stance.
Even the townies who show flashes of passion when drunk,
and love to watch their football team punish with defense,
wear racing T-shirts, and gaudier ones with the Dixie flags on the back.
They repeat the same tired dance steps to a fault.
They act like Hemingway only fought, fucked, fished, and shot
rhinos and elephants and lions
and never shined his words a thousands times before
he said good night to a gentler world he helped bless and destroy.
My buddy says he only wants the quiet life now
after all the wild pot smoking chicks gave him
enough breathless roller coaster rides to memorize
what a rock star's endless fucks might feel like.
He watches the dolphins frolic and the butterflies
flitter in the dune grass. The moon comes up high
after the cooling sunset to wander
with him among Wordsworth's windblown daffodils
where he does no one any harm but himself
for not pulling enough poems like shark's teeth
from out of his too satisfied and wine warmed guts.
