Gabe Kapler Versus Angelo Cataldi: A Hyper-Link’d Poem

For Liz Roscher

It’s arrogance that takes land, uneven and sliced through
with meandering creeks between two tidal rivers
and imposes grids, and Opticons, papers over the rest
with a compact with the powerless, spores of smallpox
dormant in the parchment. So take a hike, pal.

Follow the light, sure, but screw over the nutty German farmers at the polls,
and evolve Enlightenment into violent Know-Nothingism:
Use well thy freedom.

We forget these things by constantly memorializing them
on sports-talk radio, a Jew and an Italian
befouling what’s still, on early autumn evenings, Lenni Lenape air.
We remember the guy who broke his nose,
but dress the Venezuelan star, out in right field,
under a big sombrero and a mesquite tree, siesta-ing under lazy fly balls.

Your heroes were drunk drivers who could have killed your mother, yet you weep for them. For who? For what?

Our beloved mascots are kabuki monsters who hang out
with monsters, doing monstrous things in fetid catacombs
beneath Suburban Station, which we try to escape each night
only to be pulled back in each bleary morning.

Some conquerors get streets and statues, lay girls and
ride beer wagons; others get shoved into the river
I mean: Fuck the Vikings,

(though the Swedes were here first,
scouting out locations to screw you, buddy,
with a hexagonal wench).