Chalkdust Bear Hug

Wolverine moonbeams flicker about
A flock of dreams broods over reality
The night is one long psychodrama,
The city one lengthy obscenity
The tavern one more droning symphony
Purging all who attempt to fathom it

Patrons swelter in the ghostly heartbeat
Of the machines they must soon realize
They were meant to
become
Delusion’s life-size iron mask
swaggers out the door,
Its backroom deals inked both in tattooed acres
& broken sign language--
Each smothered in the puerile grip
common to all lives half lived,
Pleading on bended knee to be lifted
By something as blunderingly precise
as the average religious fixation
But economical as any half-baked
theory of everything

Disembodied rhetoric unstraps the kerosene boxing glove
From its rust-metal hinge--
The Grand Dame it called in for questioning
Now half as worthy as her maidenhood
& as comfortable with this as it paid
enough to ought to feel