16 - Beat Poem
My apologies. This one kind of got away from me.
No Title
Above:
pretentious placidity:
preening purposefully these petty piscivores wear white rings like silk neckties
and they pout and posture, proud of their purple-heads,
as the brown-breasted burden-bearing women bathe and buoy in men's wakes
all merry in their mere months of monogamy!
all fat in their fleeting flightlessness!
Below:
unseen horrors:
eviscerated fish, floating tendrils of shredded sargasso, ugly crooked warted webbed feet
But we only see half of it
Sitting close on that iron bench on Lloyd Lake
You say the ducklings are cute
And sure
But remember my love this is not who we are
We are falcons
We are razor-beaked raptors
We are daring duck hawks
We will snap the silk-tied necks of any malicious mallard
As it would gladly sever and swallow
The Froggie who a-wooing went.
You say sometimes you wish you were a duck but
We promised never to migrate
We promised never to moult
So death to the Indian runner! Death to the Khaki Campbell! Death to the Welsh Harlequin and the Abacot Ranger and the Dutch Hookbill! Death to that east coast fiend, that parasite from Peking - death to the Long Island Duck!
We are falcons
not just for your rough and slender talon fingers
not just for your skinny golden legs or your resplendent dappled breasts
not just for my hooknosed Garuda face
not just for our sinful thoughts and deeds
not just for our unconverted gentility, our unconditioned genitality
We are motile!
We mate for life! We mate for a moment!
We soar, passing food between our mouths as falling falling falling falling we twist up in and around each other in purifying paroxysms!
For we are falcons!
Or at least eagles
For this is America, by God
For here we rest beside John Fitzgerald Kennedy Drive
In the great state of California
And you are crying kind of
And we are sick of each other kind of
And you say sometimes you wish you were a duck but
I refuse to be flightless
even here on this iron bench
squeezing your skinny leg
And though San Francisco's warm this winter
grasping desperately to your avian knee
even if only for a month or two
I refuse to be flightless
