In a conceit old as gin and jive,
madness starts with a mid-day call.
We have an itemized relationship,
a time-based theory of insensibility:
I give you ten minutes a quarter
for Reconstruction epics,
fables of sharecropper misery.
I’m told I owe a buffalo robe,
Vander Lee tapestries of clotted purple.
Without notice, I’ve
sold a clock, a clipper ship,
burned two pages of a three page will.
You were meant to mark
a track from Adam’s fall.
With a narrative formed
from diva storms, shylock violence,
I take an apple from the orchard earth,
sleep ragged in my hunger.
You take the silver rail to Monterrey,
the mistress route to Merida.
As pattern, as pleasure point
you live off a jade and jasmine charm.
Inked and pierced, women
prosper in your sphere.
Diaries carry names of the missing,
of graveside mysteries,
of Tom Horn, Ike Turner, Ty Cobb.
Not raised but released,
I walk the world, working
ragtime boats along the Natchez line.
I’m good with faces and facts.
I know the names everyone fumbles.
I catalog chat from club drinkers,
call girls at their tanning beds.
I turn a gunman’s cold-faced threats,
the flicking wrist of a crapshooter,
into three hundred dollar stories
for Mencken’s Mercury,
the Saturday Evening Post.
I saw you once
turn your searching, sleepy face
toward a tree with burning roots.
In that juicehead journey,
you left me two ten’s towards
a sixty-dollar fare, the horoscope
proving your weaknesses would be
my first, my final charity.
Through press wars,
column quotes and soundbites,
you’re an item in a chyron,
captured image in a meme.
We learned a settled life solves nothing.
The rasp of the phone ringing,
of the machine answering,
of the message spinning out
is thirty seconds of sound saying,
“No one knows you here.”