And at the hotel bar in the city of angels
we’re talking guns, we’re speaking Winchester
and Smith and Wesson, we’re singing
of the .44 single action, and of course
the very popular Glock nine millimeter.
It’s a kind of muscle-bound, beer-fueled
testosterone party, and when the guy beside me
says, “No way I leave the house
without packing my .357 Magnum,”

​

it feels so good just hearing it,
his eyes glow with such sincere belief
in the power of gunpowder and lead
to construct a catechism, an article of faith,
that another guy, two stools down,
says, “Yeah, you want stopping power
you can’t do better than your three five seven,”
and somehow every man at the bar
feels a little hairier, a little badder,
and the room swells with macho.

​

As for me, I’ve never even fired a pistol
and I feel like a virgin
in the high school locker room,
but I love this language, this pure,
high-octane manliness, I love
how the air fills up with badass
when somebody else says, “The wife
carries a little .22 Colt in her purse,”
and we shrug and smile
with broad-shouldered, square-jawed affection
at the foibles of women
who carry guns named after baby horses.

​

And then somebody else says,
“I keep a loaded .38 under the front seat,”
and he is so fluent in the dialect
of early twenty-first century American paranoia,
he nails it so beautifully,
like another kind of person might say,
“We prefer the Rhone Valley cabernet,”

​

that we all want to reach down
and scratch our hairy chests,
we want to sit here all night
nursing our high-velocity fantasies,
dreaming of actually shooting someone
we are thoughtful enough not to call black
or brown or illegal.

​

And when I go up to my room
and stand out on the balcony
the moon looks a little queasy
under her veil of smog,
floating above the chemical bath
of the same sea that stopped the wagon trains
in their tracks, and turned the dream,
whatever it was, back in on itself.

 

Listen: you can actually hear it breaking,
you can hear the pops and cracks
and fractures of something giving way
under incredible stress.
 

From every corner of the city
the guns are crying out. America,
the varied carols I hear,
the big guns and the small,
in their rich diversity of accents,
calling to each other in the lonely night.

Calling to each other
and answering back.