Man of Steel

Man of Steel

owed to Auden’s “Unknown Citizen”

Unbuckled pride strains credulity
On cinder blocks in the rain—
Profit the man of steel
Whose chalk mentality scratches
Gold flecks of a summer night.
Blank as the dank posted willows
That slum the crum tide leeching
The verbiage of metaphor walking
Like sticks stuck down by the tracks.

In the brain waves of goats, they look
For crystalline stalactites,
But thiamine quelled the stretch
As the Man of Steel hovered
The neighborhood and plunged
Into the hypocrisy of postmodern wit.
Narrowing a brow, lifting a finger,
Touting the untoutable, scraping
The wilderness out of a circus town.

Night closes ultimately and Whimsy may fade
But Dr. Frankenstink will cozy up to her lost foot
As long as grapevines tangle on the waste land.
Neither past nor future calls his name, and no island
Brings comfort as much as departure without infamy.
He left no logical heir to fan the flames of his poetry—
That dust-drilled style of poetry that everybody reads
Until morning echoes in the bottom of a bucket.
Run on, Soul of the Man of Steel, to heaven’s loft.