Swamped

California on my Mind I 35 x 33 cm

BAYOU

You can’t imagine how long it took me

to find out that life is not a French movie  

in which the characters are precisely elliptical

in that Gaullic fashion we once thought

so witty and admirable, everywhere reeking

of cigarette smoke and of easy-

going sex and good strong coffee, it’s never

that frivolous, a difficult or dangerous situation

might surface that requires grace under pressure,

calm, focus, stealth, and even

cunning if that’s what fits,

even a kind of Machiavellian

twist to the plot—a move like that of Michael’s

in the “Godfather,” or Peter O’Toole’s King Henry

in the “Lion In Winter.” I’ve seen too many movies

because most of the time life is more 

like a documentary on PBS

about the unfortunates who live in a trailer park

lost down some ignoble rural route  

in the deep-fried South, and where it occurs

to a stand-up philosopher one Sunday evening

at a roadhouse adjacent a stinking swamp

that our freedom is nothing but an illusion,

is some other guy’s story in the end, an amiable

asshole, surely, but one with a lot more re-     

sources and pull than we will ever have, in fact   

he’s doing the Machiavellian twist

right now with the lap dancer we’d hoped—

stupidly, expensively— to spend the night with.

Meanwhile management is washing its

hands of us, and we find ourselves    

lodged between a pair of moo-moos in house-slippers

who in a certain light resemble the bloated remnants

of Thelma and Louise. Floral and huge

as a twin-set of rain soaked sofas 

on some sagging back porch in Baton Rouge

they dream of day-time soaps and the cunning smiles of evening anchors. 

Born on the Bayou