—WAS YOUR SMILE ALWAYS CROOKED?

 

Beautiful Nowhere

 

On the cruise ship deck every pale person (we’re all white) is sucking up Greek sun hoping it will make them dark but not red or black, and the blonde woman I thought I liked is in a chair two over with her friend but she won’t shut the fuck up, not even as the Filipino waiter guy entertains us impromptu with a nasty-as-hell pole dance, gyrating his groin against one of the pillars to hoots and applause, entertainment cheap as dust here, if you can afford it.

Last night the entire Filipino crew put on a talent show singing Otis Redding, Marvin Gaye, Aretha and Bruno Mars as we all waved like a wheat field shimmering in the sun, but now the blonde lady (remarkably) ( admirably in some ways) is still jabbering though it’s about Trump and how he wants to stop the genocide of white people in South Africa, and I’m thinking I’m just about as white as those poor endangered guys but I’m not so sure I want to be white anymore, or even American, and I know how self-righteous I sound in this poem, or probably in every poem I’ve ever written, and from my safe shell-shaped seat I have an interesting view of the blonde woman’s head because she’s pulled her hair back, held there by a gold mollusk-looking clip, so that it’s really more than just her head I’m seeing, it’s like I’m seeing all the way inside her skull, and, yep, she’s still yammering and I’m still annoyed though why should I be, me here in the Aegean sea where she and me have the same thinking tool hanging above our necks and both of ours are working overtime at the same time in this exact moment on a cruise ship in beautiful nowhere that would cost an African a fortune he can’t conceive of in his fine-functioning skull, and I could be wrong or the blonde woman could be, but we’ll never know now because the sun’s bowing out of this movie, taking the whole view with it.