cabildo quarterly｜ may 2018
poem for paul ryan 6
All you need is one hook
to live comfortably
in perpetuity P says,
mine isn't even that the poor
are born poor
for a reason, it's more like –
pass me that electric guitar –
do you hear
the word retirement
in Ecclesiastes?
What about tiara?
This landscape is so
fucking non-biblical.
Sometimes once you start
a thing, you finish it
just because.
I've finished bathing.
Beneath my coat,
there is a me-shaped
pile of specie
snarled like a rat king.
But this intelligence
is unreliable –
what I really love
is the low murmur
below and about me
a series of names falling
out of attention
in a word – people
with outsized
inner lives. If you break it,
you bought it, P says,
and this includes a life
and sometimes it doesn't
take that much
but by God that's how
things are,
and why not other than
just because?