The condos rise like Towers of Silence
above the palms along the shore.
Security crackles walkie-talkies,
checks which names can open doors
and which names are fallen flowers,
petals vacuumed from withered rose-beds,
smoke snakes charmed from the ash pages
of the Dade County Book of the Dead.
In the air-conditioned hours
between the pool and the evening stroll
the only moving things are disturbed birds
and the drunken sea.
It's lobbing bottles, spewing up the debris
of dreams for squalls of crazed gulls
and the five hundred pound mermaid
of a lolling manatee.
O huge placid smiling Siren
basking in the sun's sullen fire,
teach me the joke that's dug into the horizon,
that's jagged as angina
and tall as Death will ever be.
At night, in gleaming mausoleums,
our lives are racked against the sky.
Deaf and dumb, we receive tele-visions
where a generation comes to die.
The sands run, grain by grain,
through the Grand Canyons of our skin;
flotsam beaches up in our apartments
while the sea worries at the coast,
wears it down to a skull's white grin.
Here, in the land of nodding neighbours,
thick carpets padding down the hall,
we assess ass and assets in elevators,
before we drive off to the Mall.
Wandering in eternal muzak,
blown by arctic air-conditioned winds,
chilled to the soul, buying bags of ice,
haunted by those epochs when we sinned.
Yet still we breathe the dust of powdered bone,
balls tight in Miami's vice.
The annuity's not enough,
we need our little deals
and the anonymous public phone.
(This state's a pistol grip,
a handgun jabbed in America's ribs.)
But now my old body's arthritic,
prone to fevers, racked by coughs
and, all around me, America's
just more tv I can't turn off.
Every morning the beach is rebuilt.
Municipal tractors go humping the bay.
I see the starfish curling in the silt
as black armies clear the shit away.
Huge sea-slugs rot in the caried coral,
forgotten morsels in the molars of the day.
Upcoast or down, the mangroves seep
narcotic calm into brackish coves
- afternoon, your friends are all drugged, or on a drip.
The Everglades slide into a deep
funk around alligators with nightclub eyes.
They're just hanging out,
pallid, dusty-white by mud-licks, shaded,
waiting for the end of the afternoon heat.
By the blue wink of olympic pools,
wattles of old flesh darken.
Turkey-vultures cross the sun,
speckling like melanomas.
In the glare, communication
is sunspots, fading radios,
expensive bleeps monitoring our health-plan comas.
Down off freeways, hidden behind malls,
are K-Marts of lips, breasts, eyes, hair:
huge refrigerated halls
of meat in suspended animation
- a must-go, seven-day-only, sale of All Creation.
We are all dead. We are all dead.
Our names are written in the sand
brushed by municipal trucks, shored up
each day like breasts of silicone
against the long lick of the filthy ocean.