BLACKJACK (or, 21)

                All of a sudden now

                Planes are falling out of the sky

                                killing fashionable golfers

                                They think one of them might have been pushed;

                Thousands of college students

                                are sitting in the streets

                                Only to see their great idea slurred on the late night talk shows

                Buses are crashing into each other

                Buildings in Brooklyn are now falling down daily.

                Trump 2000

                Gore 2000

                The melancholy of a Clinton presidency bookended by George Bushes

                The midtown streets are jammed with

                                double breasted suits

                                and the boardroom winks and nods

                                and the din of one million one sided conversations

                                over portable phone booths

                slowly

                the peep shows have

                been domesticated

                “this world is sex and drugs without the rock and roll,”

                she says,

                in a rasp worthy of the old school,

                emphasizing the coolness

                     of a cigarette balanced

                                between a woman’s fingers

                I cough and concede.

                I’m doing things backwards for the

                                first time

                                so things will be different

                                for the last time.

It’s twenty-one days till the millennium

                                as I’m writing this, no

                                matter who you ask,

                                And I still don’t care about Marxism

                                or racial politics in post-industrial Europe

                                and neither globalization nor its discontents

                                or the exciting new movements in Ugandan architecture

                                                or what kind of crush this is now

                                                                etc

                                How could I, really?

                                I’m too American.

                                Plus I’ve got these

                                twenty-one blackjack nights in front of me

                                knowing the house always wins.