The moon’s a doubloon over the bay where we live in our houseboat. Bunny razzes
I’m a busboy on account of my black moustache, because of my cowlick and skin coat,

because my name, she knows, is Sergio Al-Ekaterinoslav, but I say,
I’m no busboy, Bunny, I’m a yachtsman. She says, Somos mismos, sailor, when we’re

necking in the blue shade of the blue tarp bluing the deck, seeming inveterate
as market forces, unassailable there as the Federal Reserve. Still, I

tell her I bathed as a tyke in floodplains outside Jalandhar and stewed later in
tenement flats and thought once of drinking from a rifle. Life frightened me, Bunny,

but now my day labors are ended, all my water buffalo are in escrow,
my laundries automated and taxi cabs dispatched, I’m the crack proprietor

of seventy-six motels between here and Virginia. Now I get paid, I get
paid, and get laid, which isn’t alien to the arc welder, the cocktail server,

or stone mason, to the lavaplatos, dhobi whalla, or gunnery sergeant
second class, but what they call a mountain in the valley, Bunny, we call a hill

on the mountain. What they call a prayer in their temple is an algorithm
in our commodities exchange. Better a loose tycoon, I say, than the wick in

a worker’s lantern. Better a natty cummerbund for a tool belt, our wine flutes
sweating in a tuxedo heat. Better not bother conserving our resources

for the next life. This is the next life! she says. No reckoning is coming. No,
only New Year’s is coming and Oscar night and Derby Day and the balloon-drop

ballyhoo of the delegate conventions I’ll do up dashing in linen suits
and pocket squares, in blazers and chinos. I’ll pass dapper as a Dixie lawyer.

If anybody asks, Where is he from? Bunny, tell her Baton Rouge, or say South
Carolina. If anybody asks, Where’s he really from? meaning the Rangoon

Nebula, meaning the seventh moon of Guadalajara or the ice planet
Karachi, tell him I come in peace or I pledge allegiance. Tell him, those tyrants

beat their keep tonight, and widows wail in wilds where the nascent widows wail, but I
let Allah triage the bodies in his Red Crescent stations, let Abraham play

arbiter, Jesus raise the dead, I’m not a tyrant, Bunny, I’m a citizen,
that land is their land, I lie with you now on the bay in our houseboat I dream in

English, algorithm, algorithm, let no cussing widow wail at me.