Sailing with Captain Tom

The spectral ghost of Tom Waits hazes in the smoking bar light

Garbled haggard emphysema petri dish to the sidewalk gawkers

Who see the mist like a mannequin in a street window

Busing in some garbage for hipsters to ogle

Time for Wonderland and the neck ties are checking stock tickers on MSNBC

Block letters in numeric rabbits checking stopwatches

For a violin army of lizards to peel off the hirsute epidermis

For marvelous root-brain revelations

Guitar grunt, stomp practicum growl baby growl!

From the Gulf to the tip of Alaska

Scouting shipwrecks of belligerent 401k flotsam 

The castaways are clinging to like life rafts after the iceberg

Pirate Bukowski barflies sailing skulls and bones

To lay out a rope like doctors without borders

For the floating power suits

Drowning in acronyms to sprout souls for the ascension

Reckoning mud flap swordfish trombones piercing the water’s surface

Baroque organ guttural snarls pounding keys

Oil slick quicksand thunder bricks golden gleam

Strung to shoelaces treading heavy

Artistic offers rejected and the comedic brigand audience assembles

Soiled palms and grease grit hairlines pop the bottled draughts

Laughing as the world’s appointment with the sunset consumes

The krill into the distended belly of the whale

Old fashioned living for a pimm’s cup deliverance

So many mumbling, “I thought we had more time than this.”

Drowning, who’s drowning gargling salt water and bourbon?

Swirling hacksaws, handcuffs, and plucked love eyeballs

Hag’s brew gumbo of usury legalities, roaches smashed in shoe crevices

Unbreakable sapphire cellular touch screens, masturbation toilet paper

Hacked internet passwords, Mecca prayer mats with demagnetized metronome compasses

Terrified to stare into that gaseous ball of hydrogen counting down in helium