Midnight Friday – paycheck cashed
at P.N.C. Bank, Kia gas tank half-filled,
kids ate 2-trays of Herman Cain’s Godfather pizza,
cat and dog asleep on carpet,
wife’s night-shift at Sayona’s Convenient Market,
mother-in-law’s reciting second rosary-decade,
Our lady of Fatima, “please, please, God,” that and that,
“save us from fires of hell,”
and Led Zeppelin miseries remain much the same.
Ache-in-heart, respectful but angry, I politely say,
Hey there, Flossie –
why don’t you turn-down prayer volume?
Hasn’t God heard enough by now?
Flossie adored those beads
as much as I adored quarters mount in piggy bank.
Hoping she got message, make haste-retreat to her room,
Flossie just sat there, drank coffee filled with ½ milk –
you know, I would have paid her to play Bingo that night?
“No, no, you have it all wrong, sonny…
It’s actually ‘You Know Who’ speaking through me,”
cackled mother-in-law, Flossie.
“Dear Lord above… it’s old Moses, remember him?
he’s still upon Mount Sinai ledge, watching drones pass-by,
and it’s all the same cosmic game… Americans? We is pawning –
off golden-earrings… and they’s smelting just as fast,
giving us paper money, and Lucifer?
That bright boy’s building a Golden Calf, Astro-Dome size.”
The Astro-Dome? Flossie become even more conspiratorial?
As a child, my favorite time, when Houston Colt .45s came home –
Bob Bruce struggling on-mound, AM radio played best it could,
father face-down at Ruby’s Tavern, LBJ’s Great Society-on-the-rocks,
all of Texas waited for JFK motorcade’s pass through Dodge;
those black-limousines, dew upon grassyknoll, medevacs in la Drang valley,
a jewel-bedecked First Lady, Gore Vidal’s 2nd-cousin –
Hail Mary, full of grace, Texas got very clammy with no A/C,
I loved to watch my mother slip into a mini-skirt,
her thick-gold necklace, the Lord and Camelot was with us then;
I laughed at Mexicans worshiping Golden Calf, sick of all bullshit,
and not sure when, but Moses is surely coming down Mt. McKinley —
I promised Flossie to blow her candle out come tablet-Fall.