Yo, Viking dudes, who knew your big-dog cock-of-the-walk
raping and pillaging would put us all here, right smack
dab in the middle of a decade filled with the stink
of war? Yes, sir, boys and girls, we're eating an old sock
sandwich, but we're speaking English, kind of a weird fluke
(a piece of luck, not the parasite), because the kick-
ass Angles were illiterate hicks while the sublime Greeks
had been writing poetry for a thousand years, heck,
history and philosophy, too, though they did shellac
the Trojans and a lot of other guys as well, stuck
them with their Bronze Age swords, testosterone run amok,
or so I'm thinking here from my present perch—a swank
appartement à Paris, swilling champagne, clothes black,
as if my past were un chef d'oeuvre by Jan van Eyck,
the soundtrack written by Johann Sebastian Bach
or his son, rather than the Three Stooges-Lawrence Welk
debacle that really occurred. My mind's a train wreck
of two lingoes, twenty-six letters, and thousands of quick
images from movies, French—yes, but mostly aw-shucks-
ma'am Hollywood Westerns or policiers in stark
black and white, and I'm the twist, tomato, skirt, the weak
sister who rats out her grifter boyfriend, palms a deck
of Luckies she puffs while scheming with the private dick
to pocket twenty large, or I'm the classy dame, sick
of her stinking rich life and her Ralph Bellamy schmuck
of a boyfriend. That's when Bogart's three-pack-a-day croak
(dialogue by Raymond Chandler) sounds like music,
maybe John Coltrane, and you're up the five-and-dime creek,
ma chère, because love can turn you into a mark, punk,
jingle-brained two-bit patsy who'd take a fast sawbuck
for snitching out her squeeze to the cops. Or you're the crack
whore with an MBA standing on the corner in chic
Versace rags, falling for the DA till the Czech
drug lord plugs him. So who are you? Not the hippie chick
of your early twenties or the Sears and Roebuck
Christian drudge your mother became, though Satan still stalks
you on a regular basis. Is that guy a slick
operator or what with his Brylcreemed hair and pock-
marked face? There's still smallpox in Hell, so you push him back
whenever you can, grow orchids and for dinner cook
risotto alla Milanese, because knick, knack
paddy whack, you're counting on something, not luck or rock
and roll, though you've been there—at the HIC with Mick
Jagger prancing around like a hopped-up jumping jack
on speed. No, ma petite Marcella Proust, this is the joke:
when your mother prays for you, your stuttering heart ticks
a little more like a Swiss-made watch, and when you speak,
does French come out? Nah, it's the echo of those shock-jock
Vikings, hacking their way across Europe, red-haired, drunk
on blood and blondes, and though your husband looks like the Duke
of Cambridge, that's not what you love so much, ya dumb cluck,
but his Henry James-Groucho Marx-Cajun shtick. Knock,
knock. Who's there? It's Moe, Larry, and Curly, nyuk nyuk nyuk.