Signature Wound
Thanked be fortune, it hath been otherwise, [&] twenty times better–Sir Thomas Wyatt
‘The flight to recover what has been lost
and found and then lost again & yet again*,’
the bastard son of the Aristocrat
spoke with a breath of anguish and potency
that, dealt in the unreasonable mil-
dew of its entirety, signified
nothing more than–in his penguin black tie
and white suit, his yellow gloves and western
stirrups–he was quite mad where, parked beneath
the curb, outside the coffee bar from which,
more than once, he’d been banished, the bastard
son sat wrinkled and slumped, looking quite dis-
stant, disheveled on the skeleton of a black umbrella,
his only consolation from the cold,
hard pavement that was his Dear Mother Earth.
On the day in question, I showed up for a hot
drip of coffee and slice of pumpkin pie.
When I first passed he was wearing one boot
and talking to a branch that he’d snapped from
a tree–and not without the cold, pitted intimacy
that swears allegiance to Kafka’s letters
and diaries: ‘My closest friend, the de-
crepit vending machine of my mind in
which a few clouds drag is dark and empty,
and the pipe […] that green reed of glass and tar
for gentlemen such as us to graze chem-
ical thoughts with blue trails of smoke is larger
than my head.“
When I returned with my warm drip of coffee
and slice of pie in hand, the branch had dis-
appeared. Perhaps this bastard son of the
Aristocrat had tossed it to a dog
as a gamble that might verify if
the stupid creature would play fetch into
the road and, ultimately, run the risk
of being trampled. Trampled by a Sub-
aru or Volkswagen that might even
then drag it by the tail like a string of
wedding cans down the street. Meanwhile, hipsters
kept walking their black cats and pet iguanas,
strolling their unvaccinated [sic] babies,
playing their french flutes and horns, as if there
were nothing to tweeze out or even to see.
*The text in quotation adapts (however slight or slyly) a few
lines from T.S. Eliot's less-known poem, "East Coker."