He has docked cargoes
with weird provenance
and none too licit hands.
Another buck—
spent in hard lights on
hard booze and hard bints
and dice that never
landed him much luck.
He reads at night to take
his mind off fact:
old mags, old masters,
telling how it should
have all turned out. In
life the odds were stacked
and what the dice served
up was never good.
Once he was young. The
young are not the same.
They always know—and
God, the way they feel!
His bones these days are
a stuck weathervane.
The dice won’t roll now
with a better deal.
