Telemachus and Spider-Man are racing,
one by web, and one by wine-dark sea.
The mermaids that refused to sing for me
are rapt, and with their watery coin are placing
bets. Both fatherless and self-effacing
boys are buoyed by pasts from which they flee,
monsters of their own making—gee
whiz I wish the finish line were facing
Manhattan’s heights, or the rosy hands of dawn,
the sun-up promise of a new and better day;
young man who, versus self-defeat, just cheats:
mind mattering more than martial brawn,
complainers left with nothing more to say—
not even Homer nods at these receipts.

Been thinking things over and wonder if I’ve
taken this whole longevity thing too far.
I could’ve watched the World Cup in a bar.
I could’ve passed on potions, had some Five
Guys. What pleasure’s wasted trying to contrive
a cure for God’s own au revoir?
Death’s not a curse, although it is a far
country, strange, and when men arrive
they yearn first for their lost bodies, then
for the words they used to speak aloud, and last
for a favorite food, familiar song, but never
for a pill, poultice, drug, immunogen:
the score the body kept is wholly past.
Love most what’s value add is: not forever.

The most progressive parents in the United States
are giving their children the most traditional names.
They force their maids to choose from Hunger Games
while they stick to their Toms and Beths and precious Kates.
Their normal nomenclature lubricates
their little brats through life, while yours? It shames
them. Paisely? Waylon? Lol. I’m James.
The well-heeled commie laughs, luxuriates
in his unearned and unfair paradox:
he calls for revolution, but he calls
his kiddies after grandma, Bible, former
kings and queens; his well-worm Birkenstocks
belie his leased Mercedes. He appalls
me: liar, hypocrite, performer!

Should the average person be more afraid
of the American rich, or Maoism? Dunno.
The round earth’s gotta have imagined corners, though.
Blow, Angels! What Kampuchea bought and made
is back, reforming fruit from lemonade,
bitter and sour, and now the median schmo
has stabilized his rent, but cannot grow
his net worth. O gleaming Austin! O Miami-Dade!
What borough-bound toiler, what San Francisco youth
dreaming of founding something, anything,
would want some Nordic model if they could
sharpen their pitch deck like a serpent’s tooth,
pay a few mill less in tax, and happily wring
more rockbound water from the bloody public good.

Call me an idiot, but I just sent
$25 directly to Elon Musk,
the richest man in the world. Oh I have spent
my life’s last cent on fortune’s brusque
mercurial whim; paid Trevi’s rent
without a wish, while pearling in the Roman dusk
old Oceanus, pale and liquescent
gazed cold at my once-wallet’s empty husk
and thought of all his river-fathered gods,
the wet, the warlike, horny, huntress, smith,
and they, in turn, such meddling monsters made
as men: kings and peasants, saints and clods,
the woe of ever passing into myth—
from world-surrounding sea to getting paid.

Our pool is bigger than skyscrapers.
I mean that in the horizontal sense;
gravity-welled, but nonetheless immense:
from World War II to honest Abe, it capers
like a new-foaled fawn who’s got the vapors,
sun-dappled synonym for refulgence
although now cordoned off by cyclone fence
and painted baby blue by the landscapers—
Rapunzel’s tower could not match a moat,
And Eiffel’s bridges long outspanned his tour;
why reach to scrape the sky at all when one
can with one’s own wet body float
and hear the little waves that lap the shore
and feel one’s monumental Washington?

Achilles wasn’t bisexual. That
was made up from a later interpretation of Odyssey.
He was as straight as wine-dark was the sea.
He banged two ladies, had at least two brats.
Loss of one gal is why he, sulking, sat
out most of the fight; so what if he
only killed and burned as bright as Ve-
nus at the death of his war-buddy, Pat?
There are no atheists in foxholes, and
even with women in the trailing train the nights
are long and lonely, cold and wet and gray—
the bedroll’s hard and full of grit and sand.
The drowsing sergeants don’t break up the fights.
As long as we don’t kiss, it isn’t gay.

If you cannot express your idea in the language of math-
ematics or code, you do not understand
your idea just yet. It’s just an ampersand
between priori and the treaded primrose path
of lightning keyed and bottled and what hath
God wrought in Morse and all the bright and grand
electric gauds that gild this promised land
forfending ruin and the old God’s wrath.
Mere words are not enough. You have to think
in algebra, in Python, calculus,
pure symbol, trigonometry—
number the idea of a post-work drink;
add up the operations of a satisfying cuss;
derive the pleasant shade of princely Xerxes’ tree.

She is signaling privately that she
has more to say about the Middle East,
month-starved unto an Eid al-Fitr feast,
gorged post-mortem from which one would flee
to tamp down talk of the clear propinquity
between region and loss, the very least
unexpected cause, the slickly greased
pole to squirrelly slip, the policy
of saying nothing, but implying that
at some omega point you’ll share a thought
or two about what went so wildly wrong,
living and dead as one boxed famous cat,
perfectly clear yet somehow scattershot
imminent and soon as all along.

She has an AI boyfriend. Her son has questions.
Will he have to call it dad, and if
it steers the family toward some fiscal cliff
will mother understand they’re just suggestions?
For all Dad I’s tirades and indigestions,
the drinks he drank, the coke he liked to sniff,
he was flesh; this guy’s not got a .gif.
Every Alexander has Hephaestions
to ride to war and conquer half the globe
while in some Bactrian tent a sad Roxanne
pines for his letters and cares for his lonely kid,
veiled lady and poor son, the technophobe,
whose merest want for mom? A human man
and not a calculator with an id.