It was never great, even back in the day.
Here Kumquat May had her episode:
Jack Hughes! Jack Hughes! she wailed
at a white-haired man, Der WeiBe Engel!
whose eyes behind tinted lenses flicked
like an analog needle. Then he was gone.
Some say she was his other woman.
Some say her beef was with Guinness
(that black door marked with a toucan)
more than it was with him or his missus,
camogie queen and once runner-up
at the Rose of Tralee: Hurly Mary,
now best known as the mother of Gord,
that poet’s poet of the common man,
whose particular brand of strum and dang
can still be heard, from time to time,
the famous twang of that broken string
on There’s a Love Knot in my Laureate.
But things are better today. Much better!
Streets that once burned like phosphorous
are now prosperous. Signs everywhere:
Spa Wholesaler: Martin Loofah King.
Joomange: French, all kosher, safari.
Prosperous maybe, but still a bit shady:
note the camel-coat crewcuts in suits,
flipping through on-sale racks of thobes,
while a diva in burka winks knowingly
at a man sipping tea in Mahatma Grande’s.
“Golan shites,” the lot of them, says Lloyd
E. Dawe, the oldest retailer on the block.
But the old have a way of forgetting
just how bad it was back in the day
with the brothers Quixote, Don and Wiley,
two hard men—no soft centaurs these—
running a little behind from the Deli Llama,
selling it to all in tents and porpoises,
but strictly medicinal, the whole front
innocent as chasing rabbits with a hoe.
Innocence thrives where we begin.
My old self follows me around like an
idiot suivant, who knows only one thing
in this world. And how that thing ran true,
and still runs true today. A radical naiveté—
Oh little turd who made thee? Take this
couple, twenty-something’s turned thirty,
who have traded in their designer dogs
for an all-terrain stroller. Hi, Digger!
Hi, Digger, squawks their two-year-old
at an idling truck, a cement mixer,
while twirling a bead with chubby fingers.
His parents gape at him in astonishment.
And I gape in astonishment as well,
when behind them, exiting The Gap,
a dwarf in a three-piece pinstripe Armani
barks, like some kind of small arms dealer,
into the beak of a throwaway phone.
Tags: Issue 76