Rodak's Writings: Poetry Noir

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I may be about a quart low on optimism:

Anthem


If I had a billionaire patron
I could run for president
and make a lot of money.
It’s that trickle-down thing,
that Enlightenment essential
the Founders intended
when they beneficently
condescended to glaze the windows
of their slaves’ cushy cabins.

(Oh, say…can you see?)

I’ve been chasing myself inside out,
looking up into the incomprehensible
face of tomorrow as memory,
dead time punctuated by robocalls.
Junk mail lies unopened, testifies
to the certainty that something is circling,
something that smells death emanating
from my life’s eroded surfaces, wafting
from the crawling crinkles of my skin
on which weird long hairs thrust up
like opportunistic weeds in a fallow field,
like an olfactory signal evaporating
in autopsy hues from the spooky end
of visibility’s snickering spectrum

(By the dawn’s early light)

If only I had a million bucks,
a dirty book and a slave-girl to fuck,
I could at least go out guilty and grinning,
rather than having pointlessly rolled on edge
for a few yards, only to topple flat,
stymied by a fog bank like a wall of stone,
to lie neglected as a fumbled pfennig
not worth the effort of a stooped retrieval.
Anything that hasn’t died on me already
lags behind to mumble gossip at my back.
And old Boogie Street now seems a fading
Hollywood dream, paved with ill-gotten gelt,
littered with the pay-stubs of preening pimps,
as the reel turns mechanically, on and on,
the spent film’s tail flapping in the cold air
like the frayed banner of a dead republic

(What so proudly we hailed)
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