mutating the signature

I am an antetype, a broken kite, a dish
of kite string withering to flake. I’ll antervate the issue –
I’m a junkie, born that way I think, and die that way.
Last week, I played sober poker with my brother.
Anted up. Six AA crocodiles
grinning over their root beers. We’re talking
antediluvian lengths of sober time here. More cigars than mouths.

Big blind, small blind. My ante antecedes their antes.
My brother sniffed two thin stripes of oxycodone
just before the poker game. The marriage
of opiate to brain like two fat men in a single rubber shoe –
antenuptially speaking, he was dry and Joker-wild.
He’s my antecessor you could say, older by eighteen months.
In the antechambers of the meeting house
my brother is retching into a mop bucket.
I should have said ‘antechapel’ just now –
the meeting house is a church, and we
sit in the antechoir, dealing No Limit Omaha.
The oldest croc, the Jefe of our crew, the motley-dressed
and umbrella’d Willly Deuces, the antedate
to all our delirium, he laughs at everything.
Some sort of Old Timer wisdom in that. My brother and I
wear massive pits on our arms, anterior. Dirty needles,
dirty knife, dirty mouth. Whatever. And coffee –
so much coffee, coffee until the room whites out.
Antebellum hymn books stacked to keep
the poker table level. Some joker’d stuffed
a copy of his 12 Steps as an antefix. The crocodiles
call us ‘antelopes’ — I didn’t get that until just now.

Willy Deuces told me (my first meeting
knuckles silver between the folds) that antemortem
there would be a time when I would cry myself antenatal.
Looked at him like he ‘d sprouted antennae, and
of course, he laughed. My brother’s eyes are tiny,
my brother’s eyes are purely theoretical at this point.
How I wanted to lick the plate, the platter
that my brother used to sniff himself
into the antepast. I did not. I caught
a toe under a barstool’s hook and pulled
until the flesh sang “Good Night, Ladies.”
One of the Old Timers sets
the church’s antependium alight
with a cigar butt — of course they all laugh.
“Everything is meaningless”, they say
so far under their breaths
the syllables could be anterooms to their shoelaces.
I tried to teach him something about
making poems — that the third syllable
before the end of the word is called the ‘antepenult’ –
thought maybe he’d see the soft side of words.
He goes all in. I call. He folds.

W.F. Roby
11/30/09 8:46 pm