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Monody for the King of the Cadillac Queens of Welfare


Who sings for the man? They listen. Who sings?

They
      -- re - enforced us and them--
will forget what he said about my family and neighbors
                                              our mothers and fathers
                                              our students
                                              our multiplicity.

His cracks chuck rain from    (both an omen forward-looking
          response back-clapping) whirling
     clouds over eight-year-old's Tulsa,
                    over thirty-three year-old's somewhere,

          out there points
                    planes
moves to          (o)
ward the other, gone,     p u l l ing   .

Or, rubbing east into west.
Or, rubbing IT in aged cracked dried skin tarped     a cover     .
Or--
Our games started with name-calling just the same,
led to fist-tackling punches and smears hmm hmm hmm,
dirt-clod chucking twice and a stabbed knee-cap once.

Accountancy.

(((Poor kids earn nothing more than their parents inherit)
                                      a campy father-figure)
                                      a patriot dropping dope float  ing signifiers))):

   Mothers cry
   Sons die
   Daughters try
   Fathers sky

For example:
A Spielberg housewife faints when her son dies,
                 daughter cries when she slaps her father,

(falls apart here: one afternoon four teams gather in a drainage ditch,
       hide away from lightning and too-heavy falling clouds,
  cloud-mass falling upward, electricity
             the bump of friction, weight of rolling
    a shame all that westward expansion and manifest destiny

game was called)

                 working dad disappears into obscured Hopper horizons. Got it. Always with Dreyfuss, 1989, big R flying off leaving behind
only his touch   a legacy   and Spielberg had to move on to war actually back to war:
                 fighting sons . dads take more modifying. Maybe a story:

My dad took us cruising post flash floods and tornados,
     chased green pea skies or red bean clouds--
     the Arkansas thick with nothing, a sore gash
   cut through
the
   ever-pulled
   southward plain
   to low Oklahoma,
a red river before Texas, or thick with dirty bean water
like to dry into cement to fill my mouth with anti-words
    my mother gave me to sing.

OK, so it was in a station wagon bought new but beat bad before it was used,
          before the children claimed it,
          before we drove it:

I hung unto the roof rack tight while you drove mad into the division?

We ate free cheese yellow milk culture.
We took WIC vouchers.
We rationed food stamps.
We wore used protestant clothes.    We should remember, and
     He was a terrible actor.
     He hated his last film, his best film.

And he authored a Schwarzenegger ascendency
     --that's where he came from--
Broken-Arrow-bound in a lo-riding cadillac, shaved legs,
all girly-soft, comfort-top, secret scent, racing river
          bankside blind calling for the mean rains
to drown our neighbors in their (not quite) middle-class snoring
          --we politely submit "aspirations"--
working or not; his memories contra our memories:

All the hateful politics his everyman muscle could squeeze, suckled
from the His Democrat, nourished via a slow trickle along a flaccid sac.

Casket-side they weep for the mother he isn't of bringing us all together.

     Her absence absent: a president turned inside out
                                   dangles.
     His presence present: a precedent stuck into history
                                   rots.

The bird I found in our planter not old enough to fly; dead, too.
Self-thrown from its nest, bootstraps and all. Gnats, sticky over-
grown flies, eating it slowly   spread eagle beneath the Black-eyed Susans.