The Muse, up before the sun, will
shake me awake.  “Wake up, you lout;
the iron’s hot.  Brush, take your pill,
breakfast, pee.  Get up!” she’ll shout

and I’ll obey, dismiss the doubt
that she’s no more than a dawn dream,
mythic close to this cursed drought,  
that she’s enceinte with form, with theme,

and will serve up both as I
dash to my desk, uncap my pen
and luminously versify.   
Sure, she’ll come tomorrow—that’s when.
                        

We cherish it as if it were tomorrow.
The grapeshot rain, the boulder wind,
us barking up the isinglass rocks
lung to lung, how the night was ripped like
a black envelope, our white manifestos
scrawled across the deep violet sky.
That night our complexions cleared.
That week we thought, “We were made for this.”
That month our soft puerile bodies grew hard.
That season we learned to think and love and smoke.
In a lull, Tommy wrote his theodicy.
He's a live stockbroker now,
but then he was a dead man who explained
the tuberose, Verdun, mosquitos,
Disneyland hell, Chief-Joseph heaven.
God, Tommy wrote, sits on the sidelines behind
ranks of cherubim with golden pompoms
forming nine-layered pyramids, leading cheers.

We battled on for weeks in mists,
in hail and sleet; we felt like Danae
and nobody admitted catching cold
or wanting food or hearing women cry.
We edited our slogans that made it
plain how the world’s cumulate injustice
had spun to this single point,
this instant when the anagnoritic bull at
last ignored the cheating cape and gored
the fake brocade with his critique.
Muscular, poor, awake at 4 a.m.,
boogying under fire, singing to distill
sweet implausible nostalgia.  Oh yeah.

There was only one fear and it grew
on us like lichen, impossible to
brush off, dirty and tough; it crept over
us like cold daybreak, stupid and grey
as lead, making our eyes itch and our
guts tremble; it took us over like a
tomcat a vole, an idiot gun
a brilliant riposte, a nasty truth a
delicious lie.  Now we have mementos, 
old fringed armbands and frayed puttees, our
unhinged shades and U.S. Keds, a few
snapshots of militant fists, blurred grins,
faces that don’t even resemble our kids’.
We knew it couldn't last.
We feared we’d outlast it.