for Gerry Nicosia

ex-wives, long poems chase me
in my sleep: it’s all a coda, really

just

one big coda like an endless footnote, it
like one massive Moby Dick or Gravity’s Rainbow length
annotation like

that no

or maybe, maybe like that stupid This is the Song
That Never Ends or

Hello, My Name is Joe and I Work in a Sausage Factory
and One Day My Boss Walks Up to Me and Says //

or maybe not

there are pictures of wagon wheel ruts from Bull Creek Texas,
mind you, that have puddles of depth into which babies fall crying

deserted in the pursuit of some El Dorado or another

babies, Christ whole babies

like the ones dying in prisons in Louisville, Kentucky
on the streets, even, while outside my house there is one more
not-so-anonymous drug deal

and here we sit looking somehow for the next word forward

these long poems
these ex-wives

I dream these things, wake up in a near panic
that this life is the one that isn’t happening

that it’s a coda

just a fucking coda

to some song no one knows the words to
like every song on the radio in 1983

we’re all singing different words to the same synth melody

whole songs lost in puddles along back roads that are no longer mysteries
because we’re lost now, lost without GPS and have no thirst for adventure

no need to write our own songs since it’s all been pushed through a marketing meat grinder

we’re all so individual, oh
oh so different collectively, really, oh

at a tender age tenderized and here we sit playing generation blame games
and the world is on fire and it burns while look for the asshole
who brought matches to a gun fight

looking in the ashes for the names of trees to give testimony

humming some song, words forgotten

and then, somewhere deep in a wagon wheel rut in a Texas Creek
death comes in the form of a smothering pillow
wielded by that ex whose name you should have conveniently erased

from all the poems since 1997