Chapel of Inadvertent Joy

poem beginning with a line from Bob Dylan’s“Subterranean Homesick Blues”

61 poem beginning with a line from Bob Dylan’s “Subterranean Homesick Blues” for Gary Close Ah get born, keep warm, short pants, romance, learn to dance circles around the jackals in their polyester grievances, hawking fool’s neon, like fake watches strapped inside a huckster’s overcoat. Hop, on the boxcar, baby, we’re hitting the ri-zoad, like a bottle of Martian whisky. Last week a cop held a radar gun to my cranium, said my thoughts were going ninety-four miles an hour over the speed limit. Lately I’ve been seeing men with shovels lurking behind trees, smoking cigarillos waiting to seal me in a maple envelope and mail me to the mud. The giant clock on the moon says I have seven thousand and four days to live. Last week I watched the shovel men slide a kid I grew up with, now forty-five, into the ground, then start piling dirt when the last taillight of his loved ones flickered away. Gary, you fro-headed, no-dancing, spiral-tossing white boy, 62 with a Phillies flag in your casket. You full-moon-of-teeth smiling, leader-of-our-stoop-hanging 22nd and Lombard crew, with your cutoff mesh T-shirts and ready-for-take-off tube socks and three Mississippis in a parking lot. You malt-liquor swilling, 8-ball sinking, drum-stick breaking, Taney-hating, laying all still in your silk box in the cancerous skin that betrayed you, the word daddy on a banner. At the gravesite, your wife and daughters cried like birds guarding the entrance of the underworld, and your soul was little chunks of bread being pried from their mouths as the shovel men dropped you down the chute to Hades. Keep warm down there, skip the romance. If you get reborn, this time learn to dance. ...