Monody, v.2

Monody for the King of the Cadillac Queens of Welfare


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

They will forget 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 s   .

Rubs east into west.
IT into aged cracked dried skin
     tarped     a cover     . Cedar closets, bathtubs, no basements.
Or--
Our games began just the same,
   name-calls
   fist-tackles
   smears;
dirt-clods chucked twice,
a knee-cap stabbed 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 huddle
in a drainage ditch, lightning drenched

          too-heavy falling clouds,
     empty upward-electricity, friction, weight,
rolling shame all that manifest afternoon flash-
flood forecast tis of thee;

game was called)

     working-dad disappears into obscured Hopper horizons.
Got it.
Always with Dreyfuss,
1989          big R leaves behind
only his geo-touch     a legacy
Spielberg had to move on to war
     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 agreed

     he was a terrible actor. We know
     he hated his last film, his best film.

He authored a Schwarzenegger ascendency
Broken-Arrow-bound in a lo-riding cadillac, shaved legs,
all girly-soft, comfort-top, secret scent, racing river
          bankside blind called for the mean rains
to drown our neighbors in their (not quite) middle-class snore
          --we politely submit "aspirations"--working or not;

his memories contra our memories:

All the hateful politics his everyman muscle squeezes still, 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.
     
A president turned inside out, dangles.
A precedent stuck into history, rots.

Gnats, sticky
over-grown flies,
eat the bird     slowly
from our planter:
not old enough to fly
self-thrown from its nest,
bootstraps and all,
spread-eagle beneath
the Black-eyed Susans.