First draft…

Goodbye, he thinks, to
all the useful heroes: the grandfather drunk on Sunday
afternoon, his boxers stained and ragged, bellowing
for another beer; the father in brown robe and socks
glimpsed from the hiding place at the top of the stairs
in the act of demanding a fast fuck
from the tired mother in the kitchen;
the neighbor who
pisses in the prize roses after coming home hammered yet again from work,
then slaps his daughter when she says she is “gonna tell”;
the sons and brothers of all these men, who
whispered the lessons from mouth to ear and into
tradition.

Goodbye as well to the helpful menagerie:
the invisible elephants hulking
in colonial-style living rooms, shitting the braided rugs
while alcoholic salesmen and pedophile pastors smile around them,
tiptoeing toward their secret goals; the fish out of water flopping
in the corners of rumpus room make-out parties, hoping to God the lights
don’t come on; the barkers and woofers and pigs sentenced to oblivion by castes
of beautiful people; the goats of football boys, who arm themselves with broomsticks
to stoke the yearning for unconfessed homoerotic brawn
in a bonding ritual on Friday nights before the big game; the gates of the zoo
are open now, and whoever let the dogs out can’t
begin to put them back in.

And goodbye at last, he thinks,
to the women who seemed to him
were always there to make dinner and diaper
and blowjob just happen, who never seemed
to say a discouraging word to those cowboys,
who may have spoken and sobbed and stared into space
when no one was looking, but if no one is there to see it happen
does it ever happen –

goodbye at last he thinks: because
a woman is looking him in the eyes now,
and saying no, and is not tentative or frightened,
just simply refusing;

goodbye at last, he thinks;
and as he sways, drunk and disbelieving,
putting one hand out to steady himself against
the grey-brown side of the newly solid elephant,
he has the newfound decency
to lower his eyes before her.