When he took showers with the other pros, they came
out of there, they said, “Oh my God,
that’s unbelievable.” Each lantern-jawed
scratch handicapper felt the fucking same:
a rod-spared child rod-spoiling for a game
and gamine tumble through the tiled defilade,
flesh, ceramic, spurting firing squad,
relief released and thus released from shame.
This guy, this guy, this is a guy that was
all man. This guy was strong. This guy was tough.
Half lemonade and half iced tea, he could
push even teetotal duffers to a buzz,
and each plaid-panted putterer to stuff
his irons in their covers, drive with wood.

I want you to picture this — Bernie Sanders
& Dick Cheney together holding a sign
that says brat fall. Lord God, your grand design
makes miracles, although, Boss, it meanders,
mudbound and slippery as a nest of salamanders,
dual-breathing mixture, son of Frankenstein:
stitch, meld, mold, combine and recombine—
proofed against presidents-past slanders
by September’s now-exhausted yard-sign green—
enfeebled avatars of two exhausted dreams
play on as their Titanic submarines,
the fogfall like a curtain: blackout, scene;
museums barred, all art replaced with memes,
and seafilled conchs now whisper yassing queens.

Coates is not a journalist so much
as a composer—one who uses words
the way birdsong is used by singing birds:
to thrill, trill, call, to warn, to touch
men’s rambling forest hearts, their souls as such—
he gathers grazing human flocks and herds
them—normies, magazine subscribers, nerds,
and independent voters. What a crutch,
to merely be persuasive, for to write
engagingly is just a shibboleth:
convincing those who don’t believe to think
anew is neither fair nor right; the white
blank page is not the place to argue death
and life. Just nod and know. Just nudge and wink.

In a photo with the wife and children of a longtime friend,
female-fringed and subdivisioned, familied
by borrowed brood and camera-conjured breed—
fall’s just arrived and hastens to its voted end:
the rains have come, the creeks have surged, the bend
in 40 out of Asheville, flood-freed,
washed away, a candidate teed
off somewhere in Eastern Florida; we’ll send
more soldiers to the Middle East and hope and pray
an aged incumbent won’t forget his teeth
or self—last night I read that just thirteen
percent of the oceans are wild yet; today
I woke in sweat; I’d dreamed I swam beneath
all light, blind and crushed and very clean.

The Jews should stand with Eric Adams. He’s
our inverse Niemöller: he does the taking
and says a fucking lot, each morning waking
beneath a sort of sword of Damocles
composed of assets for the swarming feds to seize,
textual evidence of his own making,
and barstool lies he’s spent his life mistaking
for his life: B’nai Yisrael should see in these
itself, once-bullied bullies coplike in the breach,
self-believed God-chosen singled out,
un-mitzvahing out of necessity—
our waiting haters set their eyes on speech
and free expression, rizz and online clout:
like freedom, we’re not guaranteed, nor free.

You know first stop is always Istanbul,
from Christ-converted Constatine unto
the tattered coat upon a stick and through
one New-York mayor’s fiscal opuscule—
Dardanelle-to-Hudson stepping stool
of first-class fares and frequent billets-doux,
Byzantium-on-Hundson revenue
for what?—some jerseys, some dull travel pool
of junkets? Once we laid awake and dreamed
of Hagia Sophia’s jeweled tiles, tinkling
fountains, palace eunuchs, fabulous
Eastern riches, pashahs, oh, it seemed
unearthly, magic—hadn’t the slightest inkling
it could become so grotty, dull, and sus.

There is one mayor of New York City, and that
is Eric Adams. Singular as El
Shaddai, fire-ringed as Ahab’s hell-
mouthed stab into the white void, rat-
killingly prodigious as a feral cat,
indelible as August’s garbage smell
from farthest Rockaway to Riverdale:
father-figure, lord and autocrat—
the feds will try to flay him, let them try;
how can one unskin a man so layered
in foreign soccer kit and glinting swag,
both cherry tree and ever-untold lie:
salvation’s self, the prayer and prayered-
to: won’t go quietly, will get the bag.

We need Eric Adams to succeed
as mayor because he’s mayor at this time,
heuristic method of self-same paradigm—
I AM, as Yahweh, Popeye both decreed:
born of birthlessness, I antecede
myself, by being supersede the crime
and/or the crimes which creep, and creeping climb
the Gracie basement like a millipede,
its feathered legs in strange coordination,
marvel that so few nerves could make it walk
serenely till the light! the falling shoe!
the crunch! Once-vaunted future of the voting nation
squished before it could evolve and talk,
and yet . . . it made its wings in wax, and flew.

His passion for justice sacrifices com-
plexity; he loves his neighbor as
himself too simply, from moral Alcatraz
he birdmans all the guns out of the scrum
of magazineland’s packed obamasum,
last green and gassy stop before it has
to shit its takes, thinkpieces, all that jazz—
tooting reassurance: we’re not dumb.
The writers are dismayed, and seized by fear
and trembling; heard the wailing shofar and
they cried—the Day of Judgment, not for us!
It shall not be inscribed, it is not clear—
we cannot explicate the Holy Land—
heave-ho our former colleague: comes the bus.

I’m sitting in a Romanian court with 30 women
I’ve slept with and they’re all yelling at the judge:
I’m innocent. Bitter as persimmon
and as sweet is fate’s cruel kludge,
chimera of comeuppance, punishment,
poor timing, choice of venue, pure bad luck—
what a world, to make judicial sacrament
of one man’s overweening urge to fuck
and found a cult, be bald, and be online,
giving dating advice to Anglo tweens—
Is that proper when you’re thirty-nine
or so? A rented sports car, man of means-
manqué: whatever is upon me proved,
I never did, nor no man ever bruv’d.