Heaven

Hemingway drinks his brandy here. He tells me
how suicide felt at the end of a shotgun. He is
honest and I believe him. The Princess Grace
holds my hand to stop its trembling. She smiles.

I am not sure of where I am. My grandfather
the alcoholic chats with my mother-in-law
the witch about the sacredness of coffee
though they can’t agree what to put in it.
I can hear them from across the room. I can
feel them all in my lungs when I breathe.

There is a haze of smoke from Twain’s cigar
a few seats down. Lorca, on my left, whispers
in my ear all the things I ever wanted to know
about Duende, the struggle of its shadow, the root
of its feet, I do not know these people, but I do.

I do not understand what Lorca whispers, but I do.

Dali is quickly painting my picture. He races
Picasso in some surreal contest. I see myself
in their paint. I am not sure how. Grace tells
me to eat something, drink something, and shoos
Lorca off with Ernest. The two talk of firing squads.

My wife walks up with Ginsberg. They both kiss
me on the cheek. I am relieved to see her face.
Someone shouts to Carl Solomon. Someone else
says hello. I see the girl whose heart I broke
in college. She is here and has forgiven me.
She looks me in the eyes and tells me so.

I am dying of questions. I see my mother, cured
of hypochondriasis. She is laughing and whole.
My father laughs with her though their divorce
broke me in many pieces as a child.

It is sudden, when the room hushes, and all I know
about God the pink elephant, Jesus H. Christ the myth,
stumbles through the door laughing with Hitchens.

And the redeemer of my despair sees me.
He kisses me. Welcomes me home.

Jesus H. Christ

We were all rich fiends, stumbling drunk on State Street,
clothed in our Icebreaker shirts and worn jeans,
our expensive jackets. We took a man, one of the
homeless ones, and we dragged him to the Amtrak station,
burdened him with a railroad tie like a cross. We
marched him back through town, beating him with our
expensive leather belts, spitting on his gimcrack clothes,
tearing his beard from its root. We all cackled.
When he couldn’t walk, we pushed him down the rest of the way,
took our cheap shots and ran laughing into the night.
It was all in good fun. He said he was the son of God.
He wasn’t. No one cares anyway. That’s not the way this works.

Black Smoke

You, my love, know that I fold my shirts, when they’re warm from
the dryer, in the same fashion they were packaged from the store.
That I burn hot when I sleep, when I can sleep. That I send you
to bed alone. That loving me requires verbal abuse and jokes that
go too far. That I don’t mean any of it. That I want to be stopped.
That when I was younger, I watched my father run scared of arguments
and confrontation, and that when we argue, I’m afraid of losing you.
You understand, now, after much explanation, why I still love everyone
I’ve ever loved, that I mourn their loss and wish to be forgiven.
That my mother speaks of Lyme Disease and how only a strict diet can help
her drop the pounds of poison from her body, though she still smokes
with fervor. I’ve explained these things. And many times you were shocked.
You have awoken at night to find me absent from bed. Alone in the dark
of another room, weeping with no reason concrete enough to be expressed
with language, only sobs and groans. I have preached for hours,
while you sat quiet, about God the Pink Elephant, whom I still worship
and adore and love and hate and put my hope in and in whom I despair.
You know that I need to be alone for hours on end to love you.
To love anyone, really. That I believe the world to be a shit box
mess not worth saving. Let’s burn it in the back yard, sweep up the ash
and put it all on a nuke headed for the sun. Let’s blow that up too.
Talk me down. You always do. When I want to head to the apartment
of the neighbors above us, not to request politely that they stop
walking around like drunken Sumo wrestlers, but to show them what
bitter is, talk me down. Tell me that the man you married is not
a fighting Rottweiler, but someone else with more self-control. I only
believe it because you do. And let’s bow our heads and pray
that no calamity falls upon us like the acid rain from the dark storm
system of my life, because I won’t do this again. You are my black
box of secrets. If the plane crashes and you die, so dies the only
record of who I was, all I thought and believed as a whole man.
After that, I will go unrecovered. There will be nothing left.
Only black smoke that wisps toward the sky from a fire put out.

The Restaurant

Inside the restaurant, the last of the icy mess
has melted from our shoes. Our coats are checked
and safe from the cold. We are seated by the glow
of a spurious fire, menus open, paltry questions
and answers about our day, how our afternoon
meetings went, what a funny story that was and
so on, so forth, we make our prosaic lives sound
inviting, which leads to more questions, more
conversation, joking, winks. It is warm. We smile,
our faces flushed, we banter lightly, smile again.
We prolong the gaze mere moments before we break
back to menu choices labeled with script fonts
so as to believe in the elegance of duck. The servers
are attentive. They have brought us wine. They fill
our glass half-way. We toast. We drink it all in.
The moment, the tension. The wine. She mentions
the snow outside, how beautiful it is. I tell her
that it’s not important. That she is more beautiful.
We order something I cannot pronounce. She looks
through the window at the snow. The glass is cold
and her breath is clouding it. I want to recapture
her attention. She says there are dark clouds in
the night sky. You can see the outlines of them.
That there are no stars, no moon. Talks of a storm
coming pulse like a cadence in the conversations
surrounding us. I reach out a finger to reach one
of hers. There it is, a small touch. She breathes.
She is almost back with me. The food arrives, our wine
is refilled and for a few moments, we cut the meat
and butter the bread and talk of tomorrow like
a foolish couple who have built their house on sand.
And it isn’t long, just a lifetime really, before the
wind picks up against the window. I can see her start
to shake from cold air and chill. I tell her again
that it’s not important. I take her fingers, all
of them this time, I kiss their prints. The storm is
coming she says. I beg her to listen. She won’t.
None of this is real she says. Of course it is,
I tell her, I plead. She pushes herself from the table.
I follow her to her coat. I watch her as she slowly
buttons the buttons. She asks me to follow. I worry
about the food getting cold. Of course you do,
she whispers. The door shuts after her. I wait.
It isn’t long before the storm comes. For me this time.
Not long before the winds blow. Before the rains fall.
Before there is a great crash.
And then, darkness.
And then,
Sheol.

When We Sang.

I need old friends and alcohol,
huddled over a restaurant table
with warm lights, with shadows,
with secrets. Cracked beers and
peanut shells, talks of weather,
and family, of history, theirs
and mine, flavored and steeped
like tea leaves for hours, we’ll
joke about the funny stories our
spouses don’t get, the time we set
the plants on fire and Eli ran out
into the four lane at 1 am. It’s hard
to fake the shared laughter you get
from good tea like that. The inside
joke of an inside joke of an inside
joke. I guess you just had to be there
motherfucker, if I have to explain it.

My wife looks at me with, what else can
it be, disgust, when I tell her that
I still love those guys. The same look
I got when, on our first vacation, none
of it made any sense, England with its
warm beer and tea in the afternoons.
I told her that driving on the right side
is nothing more than an old custom,
like cold Pabst and Missouri BBQ, baked
beans with bacon, seven guys in a room,
all listening to the same song, playing
air guitar because we can’t help ourselves.
Our girlfriends down the hall talking
about the future. The one I broke up with
because I was scared, while others got married,
then divorced. Everything is different.
Uploaded now. Tweeted. I see their names
online, in my chat list, just a click and a few
keystrokes away from saying hello, but
I don’t. Silence reigns over the fiber optics
while we all work too late, sending our wives,
if we have wives, to bed alone. We strain
our eyes looking at computer screens,
listening to the old songs we used to
while we work just a couple more hours,
not like when we would all sing together,
a joyful choir, a song that we all loved,
full of Pabst and grilled burgers, thinking that
maybe things don’t have to change, that we could
steep together in this cup, now running over, all
of us Psalmists, all of us lost in that same
moment, in that same broken tenor when,
we sang.