the ballad of st. paul

I am about to be in the dark writing, wrists writhing.  I am about to dream of park benches covered in snow.  I am about to dream of pine trees swathed in sunbeams.  Unlike the tepid seas that foamily, lazily, lap at your tanned ankles, my own cold lakes sever Achilles tendons like spoons through kitchen-counter margarine.  Buckling over.  Proselytizing futures.  Coughing.               

He was a real jocular kind of fellow, that Saint Paul, with his piano and his peanuts and his blond beers.  This one is to you, my good friend.  Your arms must have been so hairy and the beard's greatness goes without saying.  And if the movies have taught me anything, it is that everything was lashed with those itchy rope-belts and shit.    

I remember humble headstones and entire basket-loaves of Wonderbread and everyone being some cousin of someone else, nth-detached.  Comb-overs and crow's feet.  The Patron of the Broad Clouds whistles like a songbird then eats a single pretzel from a plastic bowl that is supposed to look as if it's made of wood.  Like the archaic weight of an ancient VCR or the long panels bisecting the sky blue of a decades-gone American station wagon.