Classic Poem

Those men with grimy fingers and fistfuls of change
let me watch from a folding chair, fourteen, on my first
summer job, all clean jeans and jelly sandwiches. Bullshit ,
they bluffed, Cocksucker . And as their dull stacks of nickels rose
and fell, the world outside continued on its way. They didn't care,
those men with trailer homes and dumpy wives —
kids who didn't like them, dogs that died. They rode a hot hand
like the last train to wherever they needed to be, far from cold chicken
poached in fluorescence and smoke ...

Reno, maybe,
sitting on a stack of chips big enough to buy that new truck ...
or farther still, to some nameless beach, the one thumb-tacked
above the percolator — white sand, two palms, a shipless sea —
where the morning whistle never blows, and water is the color of money.