An old poem, chopped into bits, and served on a platter, for your thanksgiving feasting.

(so) allen and walt meet in this bar.

I.
I dream of naked white boys
playing basketball-
these age seven savages run flat-footed to
the basket,
long black shocks of pubic hair
scraping the ground.
they move with no grace, rather with lead
(like the metal)
of foot, a loping lilting jilt, punctuated by periodic
squalls of Plant and Page-
the run of young adults whose knee caps
have been bashed out
by the aluminum baseball bats of unqualified
commercial love.
the shortest one, his bare ass wearing
bright red air jordans.
launches towards the basket while the logos
on his feet seem to swarm
and come loose and funnel around his legs, a tornado
of triangular angels.
as he begins his rapid descent two feet below
the net,
his logos fail him and stop humming, becoming little
white men, false silhouettes
plastered on bright red sneakers. they leave him
as he falls, cheap and broken.
the other boys keep playing around him, sporting their
genitals like bowling trophies. I do not know
why they are naked- they are young enfranchised and
white, filled with foam from cheap beer
and I love them, their white slit maxi-pad asses trotting
on hot blacktop,
and I love them, their translucent sweat smelling of old
curly fries and baking powder. I love
them because they leave the taste of rough cotton and
gatorade stuck to the roof of my mouth.

Ia.
in my dreams I am sitting under a railroad track somewhere in gray jersey eating potato chips, rubbing my eyes with sleepy time tater oil, and I eat and eat one then two then three. and as I sit there, gestating the tubers, the guy heating himself at the trashcan next to me starts screaming I CONTAIN MULTITUDES I CONTAIN MULTITUDES and I run to my car, filled to the brim, leaking my dreams like ice into tire ruts, hemorrhaging Doritos, my poor potato dreams.

Ic.
I am confused- did Walt Whitman know of basketball,
or am I getting this all mixed up with a poem by Sherman
Alexie, who wrote a lovely Robert Johnson book reservation
blues? I wish Whitman had at least known about real ass-stomping
spiritual blues, or something at least about gin covered sawdust
floors, rather than knowing all about boys near clear blue lakes.

What would Walt think of the island, overrun by Sherman’s
liquor stores and “no sovereign nation, no (Indian) reservation?”
Would the father of anglo-american poetry give an ass-stomping
to the higher ups or would he go down into his sawdust-
covered basement, stand on a chair, looking down at lakes
of words through the rope around his neck, never getting to see 3-on-3 basketball?

I think Allen (if he could) would take Walt to a fancy reservation-
only restaurant (the kind he would go to before giving an ass-stomping
and suck off to a beautiful boy with a straight-as-sawdust
spine) and give him oceans of vodka, goddamn lakes
of raspberry schnapps, until walt’s bladder was the size of a basketball.
Then Allen would take him home to lie on top of books about buddha and Sherman

tanks. Allen would ask him if he ever wanted to give an ass-stomping
to another man, and Walt would cringe with fear, because the sawdust
beauty of Allen’s shrugged off words would be his lake
covered in midday sun, much too warm and bright for sitting on the basketball
court and absorbing warmth. But the words would push through like Sherman’s
march through Georgia, burning without reservation.

Allen would want to fly around the anglo father of American poetry like sawdust
shards caught in a vacuum, he would want to be the lake
that Whitman writes about, that he makes love to with naked basketball-
sized toes. Whitman wants to leave and get away from his Sherman
tanks and giant linga, he wishes he had never gotten the reservation
to that fucking restaurant, he wants to give the bartender an ass-stomping

of the most profound kind. He dreams of eye-blue lakes
as Allen slumbers next to him, and he is there, basketball
in hand, playing against bare-chested kid TV mascots from the Sherman
theatre, yellow parrot heads on top of bodies from the Turning Stone reservation
casino, their lanky dealer bodies getting an ass-stomping
from walt, his long gray beard machining their offence into sawdust.

The lake was his court, and although he never read reservation
blues you could tell that his basketball money honey would cause quite an ass-stomping
to his brother, who still sees Sherman in his spinning dead mind, burning Atlanta into sawdust.

Ie.
back in the bar, before any of this might happen,
allen looks at walt, and walt looks at allen,
and the cat rubs against the barstool
and the Italian white trash in the parking lot play some pickup basketball,
moving from hoop to hoop,
and they are not anything, they are the form and grace of
bodies moving together, sweet music filling dead air space.
couple next door holding hands,
watching “It’s a Wonderful Life” with fingertouch,
so close together , you’d swear their hands can’t
be any closer than their eyelashes, and
back in the bar, the poets raise their glasses and toast
drunkenly, to the new year, one turkey away.