A QUARTET OF PAST MASTERS ATTENDS AWP

The walls around the DC zoo are shorter than I would have expected and riding the updraft of the afternoon’s first cocktails we joke about scaling in after dark to match up with our spirit animals and while such Thoreauvian jests ease some of the jadedeness from our Mastery of the Fine Arts and let us swagger through the Marriott like veterans through a boot camp, in the end the wind-driven gloom pushes us deep into overheated pubs with bad Van Morrison covers, flat pints of off brand beers and soggy microwaved mozzarella sticks until such time as the snatching of a white scarf from the neck of a Jameson-swilling Republican poet seems not only a good idea but necessary until he turns, pins his garment between an arm and a rib and we have to struggle into grease stained coats to make transient poetry with cigarette plumes in the cold, swallowing our cowardice like the shots of bourbon and leaning on through the choking bars and streets and lobbies where pale similarly scarved and carefully-carelessly clad wannabes fight with elbows and repartee to briefly share the air of has-beens as the latter clumsily flees to soirees or perhaps just quiet rooms and then the hordes fold inward, designer frames hosting narrowing eyes and what’s your genre, man? fires forth with the same intention as but none of the gravitas of what set you claim, homie? does less than a mile south on street corners never brushed by a Chuck Taylor or a suede loafer and though we do step out into the streets and fall in love with Asian waitresses merely because they serve hot food in quiet corners of corporate Chinatown, at least one of us also does squeeze the clammy hands of editors, claims his genre at least once and slinks during headachy morning hours to panels where truth and bullshit are spoken in equal parts save one of pure truth where soldiers read their pup tent prose written in the scorched Arabian desert of finger necklaces, tank-pancaked children and a poem concerning the destruction of the walls of the Baghdad zoo, recounting how bears ate women in alleyways, baboons lit out for the tree-less nightmarescape of the sandy horizon, giraffes galloped and wavered past the ministry of oil, civilization coming apart in a  kaleidoscope of blood and dream and smoke that I realize that is, at least in part, what I want for us.