very loosely after the Spanish of Tom�s Segovia
Todo hombre sin mujer es un Crusoe.
Without a woman, this man's a Crusoe,
shipwrecked by absence, decked by the gruesome
sham of drudgery: the unwinsome, lose some,
lose some more; the how-so? This whoso
dares spins out of control, barrelling bone
-white dunes. He hates the Eden between the waves,
sown with trans-ocean spores, broken wings, tail-fin. Alone,
a tattered palm for his flag, unwashed, unshaven. Not saved.
No big fat juicy fruit plopping off the trees.
No dog, umbrella, effing parrot, shady shack.
No Friday footprints, whisky, cheeky monkeys.
No Shakespeare, Bible, luxury item. No eight all-time killer tracks.
Strike out for sunwink, thrash surf, hit that swell's blue rise.
Hope to crash up, beached: Tahiti, a coast of sandy thighs.
Listen,
listen to the old hombre whose heart's a kick-start Norton,
his sonnets scarred into elbows of biker leather. Another,
whose odes are written on battered trenchcoats
and books of matches kept in the band of a snap-brim fedora.
Laconic, this one's eyes are worn by the smoke
of napalmed villages. It'd break his teeth, choke
him to use those store-bought words.
Listen, they won't say it much more than twice.
Listen to them: poet, unfrocked priest, warrior,
the lover of a thousand and three lovely women.
Listen to the Word, that one, sure as the switchblade's click.
His tongue has explored the wound and he will tell you
all Division but that of flesh be false.
Listen, listen to all the old hombres:
arrogant rabble-rousing boasters, boozing bastards every one;
maledictors and valedictors and the lovers, too.
Hombres whose hearts are tattooed
each with the name of his own disease,
whose veins are spiked with that frozen serum,
an innoculation of love gone bad.
Listen to them all,
diseased Legionnaires who joined to remember to forget,
who are forever Foreign, drunk and pumping irony,
staring down the grey world, facing the music,
the truck-stop sadness leaking from the juke.
(Know where you are...
- Down drinkin' at the bar.
Same old faces, a few new scars.)
Their bootheels forever gone wandering,
walking away from domestic chaos, chintzy comfort, curtains.
- It's curtains for them all right. -
Away from the mewling politician, the puking babe,
the flannel and the bullshit of the nine-to-five,
walking, just walking, into the neon night.
Heads full of stockings with twisted seams;
the way she rolled them off like skinning a snake.
The office girls who unbutton to press flesh
into the copier's cold glass flash
and leave their inky mysteries in some other guy's in-tray.
Ice queens, snow maidens, Frida and the Frigidaires.
Always the itch for the bitch.
Hombres who came into the world naked and'll leave it stiff.
Listen as each picks up his battered guitar
inlaid with the blood-red nails of the One Who Got Away
- the woman whose mind is forever a gap in his education,
who pussy-whipped him, or was another man's wife -
and, in a shaky vulnerable voice,
puts his balls on the cheesy wires and sings:
It's a jive life. Jive life. Jive life.