Hordes of Indigent Psychologists

Hours after my decision to defect, the elders of the West
blamed me for the drought and the power failure. Monopolists at heart,
it was they who gouged the price of remaining
to prohibitive levels. I've outgrown the sequoia. I've ogled
my last Joan of Arc at the drive-in auto da fé.

Time to release my daemon on its own recognizance,
to resuscitate my dream of staging the Ring cycle in its original Yiddish
or inciting riots among hordes of indigent psychologists
practicing in squalor under the viaduct.

Bald as my tires, I haven't hugged the road in years.
But why disclose my lusts to gluttons for titillation?
Better to misread a cluster of thunderheads building
east of Des Moines for the tops of the Olympic Mountains, my life
at forty beginning in medias res of a price war between rival masseuses.

Copyright © 2008 Scott Coffel All rights reserved
from the Southern Review
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission