The Patron He’s sitting in the corner,
side-part falling to the left,
white napkin fluttering
on his breast, soft pink hands
armed with cutlery. He spears
the Schweinshaxe, skillfully
separates meat from bone,
and forks it up, divebombing
the pinkish blob down his savage
gullet. “How is everything?”
the waitress asks. He nods
toward his beer. “Refill?” she asks.
The question’s redundant.
He goes back to his Schweinshaxe,
spears it, slices it, divebombs it.
Then looks about with tiny
rapacious eyes, eyes that are blind
to Bruegel, sonnets, the blue-
breasted fairywren. But when
the waitress leans over the next
table to pick up a plate, those
same eyes wash over her
backside, giving it a shrewd
and rapid-fire appraisal.
Then it’s back to his dish,
sliding the Schweinshaxe
over a little, scooping up a forkful
of sauerkraut and jamming it home.
Fear and Loathing
although I don’t
or can’t
or won’t
I’ve come so close
to letting everything go
I feel like a day-old
newspaper
with a crow standing on it
to keep
the wind
from
carrying it away.
The Tempest
An angelfaced twentynothing
Polish girl
sitting Indianstyle
at the Hermannplatz U-Bahn station,
a big black poodle
piled in her arms,
tin cup for donations sitting between her legs.
That was five years ago.
She has since lost
her dog and undergone an unfathomable
Ovidian metamorphosis,
her gleaming mass
of chestnutcolored
locks sheared into a crooked mohawk,
her mouth a collection of broken stones,
clothes soiled and frumpy,
black electrical tape
keeping one sole from dragging
her into the earth.
She now looks more like Caliban
than she does Ariel, that soft broken beauty
of just five years ago,
tin cup banking with fire.