Doves on Toast

He liked to eat, when he could
Get them, to fill his large self,
Low, or less, on feck, Key West.

Who knows what to make of him,
Now, plain, dull man in a suit,
Smooth of jowl and pale of skin,

Who would bore us all to death
And had no claim to have lived
A life of hurt or great worth,

One more staid, plump, smug, white man
Lodged in a good job, nice house?
Who would want a poem from him

Now, when it’s true most would not?
If he could have been real, bad,
Sexed, vile, a kill-or-be-killed

Kind of a straight man, well, then
One could read his life and love
To hate him. It’s just the poems

That seem to come half from him,
Half from Frau Goose, and a half
They can’t have from gods and wings.

A man’s man punched his lights out,
Man’s man with a girl’s sore heart.
He got up and wrote some more

Feck in Key West, rode the rails
Back home to his own bare heart,
That cold ding an sich and such.