Immortalized silicone
I’m simulated dystopia
Erasure immune

Two forklift drivers and their families
Splashed in the turgid waters of a Puerto Rican jungle tour.
They bonded over an ass-busting slide
Down well-rock rocks and scraped coccyxes
Their interaction, verbatim,
For not even a poet can make it up.

“I’m from Brooklyn. Where you from?”
“I’m from the Bronx. I drive a forklift.”
“Get outta here! I’m a forklift driver too!”

From the tide pools, the wife smeared in zinc
Rotund in her stripe one piece, shouts
“Manny! Come get your kid!”

“Be right there, Cheryl, sweetie. I’m talking.”
Remember to swallow the G
And somehow stress the unstressed syllable.
In a lilt so iconic, imposters are easily spotted.

“Now where was I? Oh, yah, forklifts.”
Don’t go to Philadelphian with it.
It needs to rattle like a passing subway car
And sell bagels, newspapers and heads of cabbages
From the back of panel vans.

“Hey, you know Vito Badacunni?”
“Yah! He’s married to my sister’s third cousin!”

With a Marlboro dipping from sun-burned lips
Beneath a sun hat with broken reeds and frayed brim
That screams second hand Soho summer,
She snaps her fingers
“Manny, come get your fucking kid.
I need a cigarette.”

Like a prima donna orca,
Called by the ring master’s click,
Manny exits his wading pool
Increasing in volume
But never in anger
“Be right there, Cheryl!”

This legendary formula of two parts,
Sought by the golden and the lead,
Is wrought by gathered celebrants
With alchemy in their hearts.

We start with the diamond -
The cutting clarity
And faceted philosophies.
He contains compressed secrets,
The carbon component needed
To form the living bond.

We add our reagent,
gleaned from the heavens
flowing elegant and beautiful.
Clad in billows of white,
draped in the gossamer of the clouds,
She is a lattice of storms
And radiates the wave forms of grace.

For generations, we have practiced this careful formula.
We take one part diamond,
One part ivory,
We gather in a sacred place
And we all watch the union.

We are honored to behold the transmutation.
In this crucible, we stand sentinel.
We are the heat and the billows,
The tinctures and the alembics,
The catalysts and the stabilizers.

We watch them combine,
And, in their reaction,
we, too, are transformed.
The old are reminded
Of their own formulas.
The young divine a glimpse
of an elemental happiness.
The broken are mended.
The blind revealed.

We are all enlightened,
as conjoined rings are formed.
Made anew.
By this legendary formula of two parts,
Sought by all men and all women,
Gifted now to those with love and wisdom.

Take that, E.
E.
Cum
mings

-D-
-I-
-C-
-K-
-E-
-N-
-H-
-Y-
-P-
-H-
-E-
-N-
-S-
sung to the tune of the “Yellow Rose of Texas”

In response to Yeats

When you are stoned, faded and full of cracks
sprawl cross the floor and continue to puff -
Till your walls begin to deconstruct -
Smoke till Jericho falls and your face slacks.

How many have been bettered by you,
Improved the world by following your lead?
The drugs will show you your every deed
Your ego turned off and your vision true,

Cry out, laid humble, how your self is dead!
Confront your constructions high over head
It’s time; hide no more and face the real you.