Magic for President

On Channel 4's Olympic trials,

the USA Dream Team trounces South America.

NBA hoopstars with casual grace

render victorious drama

from 4 quarters of toying

with the less bionic bloods

from south of the border.

Today for the last of the quarterfinals,

we channel naked heroes,

America vs. Brazil,

while wooed on Channel 5

by Democracks vs. Republicants:

those bastard Texans

baboon budget-balancing Pea-row

that cranky colonialist Bush,

glint-crowned Clinton.

Back on Channel 4 our main man

Bird spares his back, bad as JFK's.

The limping white god on cortisone

pain-paled to ghostliness in his silks

shoots symbolic first and last goals.

Malone, night mailman of the foul shot,

stands at the line whispering talismanics

mysterious as voodoo economics –

Don't read my lips! –

then whishes zeroes down the chute,

barely swishing the white network.

Michael twists in air he's lord of,

in gyration that mocks torture,

his body breaking onscreen like a lashed slave's

in an agony of goalshots,

his agile absent-minded miracles.

We switch over to politics during halftime

to weigh values and place in the world order,

cunning strategies for tribal domination,

would-be kings maneuvering for position.

Real patriotism comes to its feet

when Magic lopes onto the court.

Everyone cheers for the hero

wagging his body easily on elastic legs,

loose as a clown with soulful-painted eyes.

With big open palms he blesses the team

mournfully smiling

his cheerful rich man's view of the end.

In the stands his betrayed bride holds their baby

unstained by the thousands of votes

Earvin won in strangers' beds.

The virus adds its circlet, its fatal thorn,

to his brief garland of athletic virtue.

Without a platform to make America whole again

Magic sells Coke not condoms

to one disunited nation

that cannot see between its legs.

His message, nearly wordless,

explodes with intergalactic appeal,

crossing party lines, transcending language.

With ignorance and grace

and all those millions of dollars,

all those millions of viewers,

in all the fatherland of his beloved body

he tends the seeds that kill.

                                - 1992