Jerry McGuire

The Early Years

Still through the hawthorn blows the cold wind

              Shakespeare, King Lear

Crapulent, cold a’lonely in the crepuscule,

gaggle after gaggle swooshing this

way that way, mud in yr eye,

which keep disappearing? None

for me, thanks, he thinks. A little

corny, flustered aberration, corpulent

and suspect. Gallery of holy aspirants,

sublunary flame, Tsigane, Chagall,

and a balloon in Japanese. Christ

to be nailed here, ass on a stool.

Cockles and mussels, insinuated

preclusions, all the time in the world.

Adore me. Pluck my lint. Compose

yrself. Flag down that apparent

instrument of declension. Which

is in store, in stock. A queer honking

outside, flurry and crude rush nowhere,

and you and I left alone tonight, cool

interlude, dark musics, chilled liquors,

no one left dancing in the cage. Let’s fall

back and disappear, as the crossdressed

palindrome said to the uptight palimpsest.

***

Half Moon Creatures

You’d say half full, not half empty. And can’t help

but celebrate the greater notoriety of fullness, what it means

to be replete in light, nothing but light. How out of the light,

the creatures of darkness come singing their low songs:

Wolfman, serial mutilators, phantoms of opera, the works.

Indeed the moon with its Gorbacheved reflection gets the glory,

and the famous blame, for everything. Whenever two children

in the same city get torn to pieces on the same night, everyone

glances up, and there it is, that loathly face, red

farmer, pale bloated boil of night, always at a head.

But tonight’s antennae are differently tuned. Nothing comes

and stands up crooked like a mummy or superglued heap

of recycled body parts to pray or bay towards this en pointe

semicircle, ready to topple off its toe and wobble still.

No lycanthrope cut back to only quarter-wolf

howls up for his translucent bowl of milk.

The worst woman-and-child-choppers of our nightmares

lie sleeping off their excesses, their dreams a cryptic calling

for more light, always more.

In this half-light the monsters

themselves seem half-full of themselves merely, gutted

semi-presences that pass the light like smoked glass. Here

the Snarling Man speaks harshly to his fragile mother, there

the Lousy Teacher smiles and pencil-whips a boy into despair.

The Traffic Cop commits the extra minutes needed

to intimidate. Here’s The Banker Who Says No. The Fucked-Up Boy

who torments the timid one. The Perfect Woman who laughs

her silver laugh at the pudgy depressed girl

in the checkout line. All the crossbreeds here are innocent—

the Earthwormduck, the Porcupinebaboon, the Muskoxfrog—

and it seems in fact that everyone is innocent. Still

the Wolfman is out there waiting until these half

measures are history. And we hunger for him, to be full.

***

Surprize!

Brisk march wind morning

chimney hiccups and blows in

six pissed-off hornets

***

***