Tom Waits Got Rained On By His Own Bomb’s Fate/ poem by Dennis Doherty

He smells, the sputtering smoke and spit of rolled tobacco,
the jerky sweat of hieroglyphic tangos under flood lights
and insistent loser-tears of his own faults that he believes
earn and deserve your loving body: nurse that articulate pain,

the ironic growl of romantic sentiment in song’s exposure,
our own nude psyche, child. We always witnessed our guilt.
You miss wanting to know him, confessor,
 but you lied in the booth, slipped the priest your clean
fingertips, everted pockets that once housed
palms sticky with fun filth, the cradles of sin.

Even his rhymes won’t hide – bubblegum,
jaw breakers for American cities.
But now we’re into a seesaw plasma:
he’s been swallowing daddy’s gunpowder.
His feet smell like trespass, offal, the gym.
We are every child we’ve ever been.

Bomb smoke meanders, effluvia of
humanity, reconfigured by heat.
The waning wood stove, memory of fire,
sculpt hard the sinews of abandoned wood
into cinders like blackened gator skin,
scent of all the warmth we ever needed.

/////

Dennis Doherty is author of four volumes of poetry – The Bad Man (Ye Olde Font Shoppe Press, 2004), Fugitive (Codhill Press, 2007), Crush Test (Codhill Press, 2010), and Black Irish (Codhill Press, 2016), as well as an extended meditation on Twain’s great novel: Why Read The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (New Street Communication, 2014). His essays, poems, and stories appear throughout the literary press.

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