The Late Show

(By Mike Anderson)

I lay down my robe, and the sea was hungry

My skin was cold in the angry shade

The children there were not my enemies

I bought apartments there on the corner of Knife and Handle

The alleys, the bars, the long highways

My automobile rusted by the river

And the water there was not my enemy

I have a brother who drowned in the Gulf of Mexico

So I hiked a hitch with a blandly mother

I’m a youthful stranger, unlike your other

The exits there were not the end of me

Drunk in my jacket, I sold them insurance

Son have you heard the hermit in the mountains?

His sunflower unholy battered soul

What more could I name, what more could I name?

Grime skin mad black things spiked his eyes

I said, “Sir, that man is not my enemy.”

And the pigeon pots on the window sill wilted down with fear

I lifted a knife in the house of love

Like a child catholic throws a dove

And the death that comes from your enemy

Plays sweet sad music like a horse head sings Sinatra

“You think you’re a big kind of dreamer?!”

Moon moon moon and a million lives!

The circus of forms that you send to me

I stove away under the stool of my piano

Long melancholy of long-legged Mary

Tried to scratch out the moons decaying gloom

Watching the late show with a cigarette in the room

The station close projects a shimmer on her skin

On an elevator 100 miles away

Squirts insulin in a fistful of his skin

The sugars there were not his enemies

Apples in ice-cream: a perfume to his soul