7.17.2023

YAKETY YAK, PART 4

UNFORGIVEN

It’s 4 a.m. in the strip mall lot.

He’s facedown-drunk
on the dew-slick hood
of his red Mustang
under a blue neon sign
that has a burned-out T:
BART’S COCK AILS.

But not so long ago
he was the hot-blooded prize
racehorse out of Pegasus,
poetry on the hoof,
triple-crowned.

Unsaddled now, retired
and resigned to stud duty
in an MFA program where
the feed bags turn up on schedule,
he’s spent seven years tying one on,
corralled with brooders and cribbers
and barn-sour geldings and knacker-bound nags,
sucking cigarettes and sucking up
and siring the new generations,
all the while trying to rustle up
enough self-esteem, or self-abuse,
to keep his callused hand in the game.

Which brings us back
to the glint of blue neon
on his fragmented spirit.

The truth is, in all these seven years
he has published not one syllable
and, to tell the whole truth, failed
to write anything at all, and now
he’s put his tenure committee on the spot,
just when his esteemed colleagues
had hoped to laureate him.

Instead they must slam
the paddock gate behind him
and turn him out to roam
God’s grim country.

He’ll spend the rest of his days
driving that aging red Mustang
dawn to dusk, east to west,
down those lonesome highways.

Come September he’ll ride
into some small town like the new sheriff
and hitch up to an adjunct post.

And come June he’ll ride out
on a rail, in a hail of fire
from a posse of young guns.

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Performed 3 November 2022 for the One Full Wit Reading Series.

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YAKETY YAK, PART 1

YAKETY YAK, PART 2

YAKETY YAK, PART 3

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