I'm in love with dark American movies
And bad coffee, but why, in diners
With pink space age lighting, with steel resisting neon,
Like the Chinese restaurant of your dreams,
That wide-brimmed bent hat slumps
Over the white coffee cup, the iconoclast stares
With the remorse of loneliness, with savage skepticism,
At a scene it seems is made for his needs,
As he smokes a Pall Mall as if the waitress
Hates him as an interloper, in for the ambiance,
Not the enormous clacking aspect of poverty
With white gloves and oversized shoes,
Sand dancing furiously, but with bare reverberations
Of feeling, tapping when no one has any dough,
And they've seen it all before, becoming violent and ugly.
The unrestricted face detaches itself
To bus depots, hard luck walk-ups, fleabag hitching posts at the dark end
Of the dice, stoically moving to the empty fruit crates at the junction,
The place where failure is no longer dangerous,
Seeing in its blue light not so much a gross distortion
Of those magnificent lying set of rules
We call America, but a gross distortion of need,
Fed by well-lit vending machines, and finally facing
The knuckled resistance,
As if almost nothing is too much.
One contemplates someone so wounded by the thought of failure
He can't lift his craggy, unsatisfied face from the plate
To see how his toothless, overwrought position is not
Evil, is not failure, but the kind of lean endurance
Every American movie hero is driven towards,
And one expects the tourists to drive up in their Subarus,
With film, their way of enduring it.
