Flash, a Burbank California talent scout dressed to the pips,
Hits the “Welcome to Tiskilwa” (Illinois) slow-the-fuck-down rumble strips
In a National
premium
crossover
black
rental car,
With a line on his next major movie star
Discovered last month in the cyber fleshpots of the triple deep deep deep web,
An eighteen-year-old
gay-for-pay
live-cam
celeb
Cum high school basketball player:
“A regular
high school senior
(smashingly) handsome
athlete lady-slayer
And forbidden
nighttime-pleasure
purveyor.”
Flash finds the high school easily.
“In a small town everything goes just breezily!”
Outside the gymnasium are three
visiting-team
yellow
school buses;
Inside, an acoustically live ceiling above bare
flat
steel
trusses,
From which hang conference team pennants, championship banners,
And an American flag, each one validating the high school planners,
As do double-sized
glazed
structural
facing tiles
The color of honey,
And the matched maple wood playing floor
Gleaming beneath electrically sunny arc lamps,
While the nighttime darkness outside hides
Behind Works Progress Administration
Signature (Owens-Illinois) Insulux
silico-soda-lime
translucent
glass block
fenestration.
Hidden also, where fans must not see, are locker rooms,
With white-enameled
pressed-brick
wainscot,
Icy Hot fumes,
And pale Palmolive-green
Beautex plaster
walls:
Everything so clean and sudsy, it incandesces and it slips and finally it falls.
Home team fans pound on retractable
douglas-fir
board
bleachers,
Fans all ginned up by the pregame rally which features
Pretty cheerleaders wearing blue
whipcord
rickrack-trimmed
pleated
skirts.
“Cheerleaders are popular; the pom-pon squad though are slutty cock-teasing flirts.”
“More like cheerleader tramps
For conference champs.”
Oh, and the pep band too,
And the color of school spirit, which is white and blue.
At a high school basketball game, a thousand things happen all the same time,
Some part of a plan, some improvised on a dime;
And running through it all, an invisible river on which float fragments of conversation
Much of it freighted with implication, prevarication, physical education, dark insinuation.
“Lysol, in proper dilution,
Is the sanitary solution
To periodic vaginal pollution.”
A Methodist minister asks, “Are you washed in the blood of the lamb?”
A stoned wrestler answers, “I’m so ripped, I probably am.”
“There’s the national anthem a cappella octet—”
“You know the mezzo has not descanted this season yet.”
A kid eating ice cream from a small Styrofoam cup,
Says, “This flat wooden spoon makes me want to throw up.”
A concession stand crone licks her thumb and counts bills,
Making change from an embossed
leather-finish
gun-metal gray
powder-coated
SteelMaster
cash box
With cantilevered coin tray.
The booster club sells spiritwear from a folding table
With a blue
stain-resistant
blow-molded
polyethylene
top
Near the gymnasium entryway.
At halftime, reading the local newspaper while waiting in the concession stand line
Flash notes with dismay a sports page article, “Brady to sign
This Spring with Illinois State.”
Flash sneers menacingly, and thinks, “He’s going to sign at any rate,
But not with any college.
What would he even do with all that useless knowledge?
If I had those movie star looks
I’d never even touch the books.
Plus everything’s online now anyway; people don’t buy books anymore.
Christ, they don’t even rent videos from an adult book store.
This ‘double kill siege gun’ does however got plenty of brass,
As well as a killer pocket pass.
But having now seen him in person, I really don’t think
He’s got many years left as a celebrity twink.”
Now he cyberstalks Floyd Brady on his iPhone X;
He laughs and he texts his supervisor whose name is Ken:
“You already scoped I assume his Facebook page?
All the Internet’s apparently a stage!
So wholesome it’s fulsome.
Dead giveaway he leads a sinful double life.”
Ken answers, “We’ll cut the valuable half out with a knife.”
“What one wants is maximum pulchritude—”
“And just a soupçon of attitude.”
“Women stars you can find for sure, at Schwab’s corner drugstores.”
“A dime a dozen, like Hollywood Boulevard dirty crack whores.”
“Male stars are harder. The audience must want to be them.”
“Yes, that’s the thing: actors give their audiences freedom.”
Sport, however, is not acting: it is reality,
Although it shares with art the quality of finality.
And both cause people to feel real live needs,
But when an athlete is injured, it is genuine red blood that he bleeds:
Tried and savaged, ripped to shreds by spikes.
But then tomorrow, a brand new pair of Nikes.
Feralum safety treads on HAKO
factory-waxed
asphalt-tiled
stairs
Are like acting, and so are the violent clean pleasures that strike you unawares:
Hot bood, like Lysol, burns.
(Revised, 2023, mainly to use formatting as a tool for clarifying the heavy use of cumulative adjectives, coordinate djectives, compound adjectives, noun adjuncts, and proper noun adjuncts. There's only so much work the comma can be asked to perform)