GRANDPA WAS A SALESMAN

It’s the day the day
Everyone else is vacationing
At Fire Island, none

Of them trembling with the significance
Of foreboding nostalgia
But I tell them to mind the beach

Lights, my most virulent memories merely
Tantamount to the gleam
Of the glasses of the thin man

Peddling Duracell AA’s
From car to car, the inevitable
Thrill I feel being

Surrounded by anonymous
Creatures insolently
Daring someone to fuck

With them on their
Commute, the dreary sonic
Lassitude of burned-out

Churches skewering
The horizon or a wall map
Gone secretly glue

Under the damp blue
Corpse-light of an airplane
Bathroom, the defunct

Psychic persists, a distant foal
Stammers and stamps, what
Were you thinking crowding

The world with such a cowardly delirium
Of thoughts, the soft focus
Of death rifling each tacky eye

Of the passersby, I am not interested
In the pithy forensics
To which this contagious

Dream gravitates, I like
To get stupid with my friends
To get nostalgic for

Futures that never were
In the dusky resettlement
Of chances, Ben

Wrote a poem at age
Seven about a robot made entirely
Of panthers, yesterday I

Squeezed my bicycle past
A sleeping man meticulously
Wrapped in Mylar

Balloons, this is a study
For a larger ancestral
Portrait, this poem was actually

Purchased in Beijing in 1890
For a handful of silver
Fillings, I used to sneeze

Constantly until I had my braces
Removed, my dad
Tore his off through

The horrors of poverty, grandpa
Was a salesman who drank
Half-a-dozen Coca-Colas per

Afternoon, his mother had twenty-two
Children, three sets
Of twins, many died, as did

She, before she was fifty, before
I was born and it strikes
Me that every person in every passenger

Seat in every car in
Every town in every country
Is having some goddamn

Thought, this is mine.