While women are destroying men everywhere simultaneously,
The men who lose are surrounded in grey,
Making occasional forays to the liquor store,
Waiting through streetcorner cigarettes.
Their brains are unused chambers,
The souls sucked by a pervasive self pity,
The wind can't be felt, it is only a sound
Of winter crying — in the flames of spring air.
The homes where they can be drenched in every emollient save one
Seem vacant and distressing to them from even a slight distance;
A new low pang forms when they think of returning
But another block more of such men is too much.
They think of the innumerable, in animal robes
Sharing wine by the fireside, with crescents and roses,
While on their shelves, priceless words collect dust
That could be gold to lozenge the smoky air.
They return to their own neglected treasure.
What they are has no value. They converse
With ghosts, but it is they who are doing the talking
And the ghosts too selfish to respond.
They practice being artists, weave threads of pain
In bundles of knots, a gift to love.
They seek out the junkies who suck grey dick
And look enraptured in vapors of light.
They stay in the tavern, desecrate the art on its walls,
Making it more red with violation, keen with irony
For these devotees of affectation, who still look at occasional couples
With longing, even as they throw all subtlety to the wind.
Tough men embrace cold glasses with delicate hands,
Quail at the sight of young girls out for the night
Under the romance of the beer light. The men just slap pinballs
Hitting snags and alarms on the way down.
A few wonder about those other people,
The ones who listen to the radio, who sell
Their souls for a wife, home, kids and career
When there is so much anguish that can never be shaped.
They may sit there sulking for years,
As failures create new, less sustainable fantasies.
They dissent on bootleg Nancy Sinatra
And try to find a name for another doomed band.
Most of them sleep, eventually, and make amends with the familiar.
They find ways to wake up and cook themselves eggs
And try to look on the morning with someone else's eyes,
One whose small room can receive the whole world.
