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