Of the two partners, and the total is the number of books

That team must try to win. Is that not right? This is a game

That tests the boundary between mathematics and magic,

If you ask me. A bid must be intuitive like the itchiness

Of your upper lip before you sip strange whiskey.

My mother did not drink, which is how I knew something

Was wrong with her, but she held a dry spot at the table

When couples came to play. It’s a scene from my history,

But this probably should not be mentioned in our documentary

About Spades. Renege is akin to the word for the shame

You feel watching someone else’s humiliation. Slapping

A card down must be as dramatic as hitting the face of a drum

With your palm, not hitting the face of a drum with a drumstick.

You say there may be the sort of outrage induced

By liquor, trash talk, and poor strategy, but it will fade

The way a watermark left on a table by a cold glass fades.

I suspect winning this sort of game makes you feel godly.

I’m good and ready for whoever we’re playing

Against tonight. I am trying to imagine our enemy.

I know you are not my enemy. You say there are no enemies

In Spades. Spades is a game our enemies do not play.

FOR CRYING OUT LOUD

And I understand well now, it is beautiful

to be dumb: my tyrannical inclinations, my love

for the prodigal jocks aging from prime time

to pastime, the pixilated, plain people and colored folk

with homemade signs. Cutouts, cutups, ambushes,

bushwhackers. MC Mnemosyne shows up

around midnight like the undetectable dew

weighing down the leaves, and I’m like “Awww, shit!”

Why ain’t I dead yet

like the man who wanted to be buried

with the multimillion-dollar Van Gogh he bought?

(Members of the Arts League said no

because there was culture to be made into money.)

The volant statues of the aviary, the jabber-jawed

cable channels, and the book in which nothing is written

but the words everyone uses to identify things

that can’t be identified. Not that I ain’t spent

the last ten years of my life refining my inner cyborg.

Interview questions included: how did the DJ break his hands,

who’s gone to bury the morticians who bury the dead,

and what can one do about the sublime and awful music

of grade school marching bands?

Not that Neanderthals have a sense of the existential.

Me and my forty-leventh cousins lolling, and LOL-ing

like chthonic chronic smoke, like high-water suit pants

and extreme quiet. Everybody clap ya hands.

Like fit girls in fitted outfits, misfits who don’t cry enough,

who definitely don’t sob but keep showing up sighing.

Everyone loves to identify things that have not been identified.

The rabbit hole, wherever I find it, symbolizes solitude.

So that’s exciting. And an argument can be made

on behalf of athletes, rap stars, and various other brothers