D.C. After Dark

D.C. After Dark

The machine of legend looks like its been on a binge,

listing clackless, hungover and abandoned,

screaming out no more secrets

from its rubbery cylindrical mouth.

It sheds bits of rust with the angry silence

of an old man’s  rheumy tears,

as if in its cancerous steel gut it misses

the caressing fingers of the Famous Beltway Reporter

who once sat here, fueled by tanks of scotch,

fat white cigarettes like obscene stiff worms

leaving their spoor on the scuttling fingertips

pounding the keys with a lover's self-focused delight

crescendoing release on the last page.

For years he covered D.C. after dark.

The pettifogging mooncalves

shysters and snollygosters who

bottomfeed themselves in the salons and dives

came to him first with their reeking tidbits.

He thrived on the unspoken but finally discovered,

followed his nose through the fug of sex and death,

tapped out the authenticated fables of braggadacio

or translations of confessions barely breathed in the dark

as innocents say their soft prayers to a predicated god.

He was inquisitor and thief to those who loved their sins,

smug counters and recounters of their iniquities,

his job to rob the boxes under their beds of guilt and proofs

of potency, strip the skin off their success

and show the bloody emptiness within.

His old Royal was a mad scientist's laboratory

where all the lies and ramblings, all the body parts
of stories were given a blood test, 
filtered through clean white adjectives
administered a shocking phrase

then sealed with tight lines from insider sources

into neat packages to alleviate for some few minutes

the bland boredom of the world.

His choice to make banner headlines

out of ginwhiskered rumors or

lay a blanket of newsprint over cold uncomfortable facts

and put them to bed forever.

Now young blogging upstarts sniff and tap while the

empty wind of words whistles down the internet,

for the Famous Beltway Reporter died
like all the rest, coughing up a lung

and wringing out a bad liver,
clackless, hungover and abandoned,

outlived by his byline, with only the cold

sad truth to sit at his bed and

no one even to inherit his typewriter,

a mumbling derelict forgotten,
passed out under some bridge in the night.

February, 2011

snollygoster: –noun, Slang . a clever, unscrupulous person
~dictionary.com 

Posted for One Shoot Sunday at the inimitable OneStopPoetry

 Image: JackAz Photography