Watching

CNN last night was problematic. Fashion. I kept wondering about that little tadpole’s tie. And his dark rims. And the reporter down on the street like a lacrosse player investment banker at happy hour. His body language said: wrinkled oxford. It’s how you wear the clothes. Brooks Brothers. A swarming city with kids pounding on police cars and stabbing fire hoses. Hundreds of Baltimore looters giving fingers to helicopters. And teenage mothers spanking their teenage sons across the face! And a man ducks through the smashed out glass of a CVS and holds a 12 pack of Charmin to the clouds like a World Cup. But that tadpole. Prematurely un-pigmented. He scares me. He latched right on to Robert Valentine. Robert Valentine. You heard it first. Well second. I’m not an anchorman, nor anchor poet, nor is this news. But still. Vet Valentine said he’s been through the rice, and now he has courage to step up between hard plastic cop-shields and the taunting thugs … on the streets of Baltimore. As Gram Parsons sang. Where is that song when we need it? And my dad conjures an image of his days as an intern back at Hopkins in ’68, when my mom, pregnant with me, gave him a metal egg-beater bowl to wear on his head on his drive past rioters to get to the hospital.

Jeremy Sigler’s latest book of poetry, My Vibe, was published by Spoonbill Books.