Blitzkrieg
by Joe Eldridge
One week after Lincoln's birthday,
on a dirty snowmelt in the gutter day,
I polkaed past my Mainz hotel's excavated
strip of a Roman wall, danced down
salted steps towards the Domplatz,
segued into a vigorous waltz
three-quartering to the golden Rhein,
but shy of the Guttenberg statue,
forty steps from the horror struck
face of Pope Boniface II, sixty paces
from the grudgingly touching
memorial to the Jews of WWII,
I was completely flabbergasted
by what I first thought to be
a group of locals pondering
a vendor's lackadaisically penned menu
but on blinking it transmogrified
into an anti-war activist's Mercedes door
peppered with exclamation point slogans
prominently featuring a blown-up
poster of Bush, the secondary one…
wickedly smiling…eyes slightly off-kilter…
and while I know not a word of Deutsch,
a boyhood of Col. Klink bellowing
at Sgt. Schultz translated the animated
protestor so I got the gist of dummkopf.
That night I dreamed I had sex
with the President and all
the writhing in the world
couldn't prod him into action.
He was a lazy bottom, a do-me
queen who lay immovable, limbs
stretched out Da Vinci-like, gripping
all four bunched-up cotton corners,
stubbornly hanging on with the tenacity
of a monkey hanging onto a tree
in a monsoon, and that goofy,
goofy winning grin of his
forcing me much too easily
into doing all the fucking work.
Joe Eldridge is a black belt in Seido karate competing in Gay Games VII in Chicago this July. He has published poetry in The Gay & Lesbian Review as well as Windy City Times and will begin work on his MFA in poetry this coming fall at Columbia College.