The Usual Entertainment
Little lost and gentle soul,
companion and guest of the body,
get ready now to go down into
colourless, arduous and bare places
where you will no longer have the usual entertainment.
—Hadrian, as transcribed on a sign displayed at the Castel Sant’Angelo, Rome, translator unknown
How the sweat-drenched vendors hawk
Old Styles to the drunken disorderlies—
who are us!—in the pilsner light
of August buzzing with gnats and lingo,
the umpire barking his commandments
like a clergy, the manager barking back
like a heretic. I douse my dog in ketchup,
and buy me some peanuts and Cracker Jack
just for the toy and a small blue helmet
of soft serve for Jorge and a Polish for Mike,
and three cold-slicked beers numbing
our thumbs in the upper mezzanines
of the food chain in the city of my heart,
Illinois, where we lose so much more
than we win, but whatever the score,
I ask them, What use is the soul
without its tongue and its teeth,
without its nose for the cut of the grass,
its ear for the hum on the air, without its wants
and its words and no throat to holler them out of
to anyone glittering here in the sticky of the cheap seats?
