Virgin Mule

The conversations of the French Quarter mules in their stables after a full day of pulling tourists and voters over cobble- stones is not espresso witty and in their dark no TVs feed them news of the ends of mules elsewhere in the Middle East and West. In our stables the ends of others are a fact of atmosphere. The yoyos on the mystery island nextdoor are revving familiar tools in backyard now gripped by failure first of electricity than of a meaner something that’ll grow into nothing we’ll know in the A.M. Once they were visitors like us then they grew mulish in their bubbles and pulled whatever was put around their necks in- cluding a banner that said, About What Kills Us We Know Little. On certain nights after a good internal fight we hear the voice- less others through the glass fearfully sweet’n’soft like dough. Oh let the monsters in. Help us rise above our not seeing them, may they let us into their eyes as well. Banish the blindness of these cobblestones, clop, clop. But! Pffsst! Our notes are in- complete. Loving you was never on the agenda. Better to sing as roughly as the stones. On Memorial Day we had one thousand hotdogs & counting. Didn’t visit a single graveyard. We the Grant Wood folks scan the sky for incoming missiles: blips ourselves we understand timing and touring in America. The gilded dads in the portraits sought the idealized continuity now moving before us democratically in showers of pixels and dots. I’ll go with the distracted mariner, my lover, and we’ll be in the world. It will be late by then and dark. We lyric virgin mules keep our book of hours in a dream apart, having stranded a billion turistas. But we could not break the chummy hand. Ready to brave the snow without a hat, severe weather notwithstanding, we merely nod and understand.