Pineapples

Stumbling, stuttering, vacant and lost,
The old man with the Billy-goat beard
And the 15-gallon straw cowboy hat
Cut through the crowd of consumers
At the Wichita shopping mall
Like a machete through a pineapple
In an old South Seas survival film,
One that the old man had seen often
As a child at the now-closed cinema
Downtown by the Harley dealer,
Where one of the dudes has a similar beard
And a fondness for blades and forbidden fruit,
Though pineapple is forbidden only by fools
Who’ve never been to the Oahu roadside stands
Where the old man with the beard and hat
Used to take his girlfriend for a treat
After a long day of snorkeling and making love
Before his Naval hitch ended and she stayed
And he returned home to the aircraft plant
And his high school sweetie who’d broken his heart,
That same sweetie who died giving birth
To a daughter who died later that day,
And he started in with pineapple juice and rum
But soon shucked all pretense and decorum
And took to the thick strong wine
Straight from the brown bagged bottle
Until he couldn’t keep anything in one piece
And bit by jagged bit he burst apart
Though that bursting took twenty years
And this morning he went to the mall
For no reason, no reason at all,
And walked its sweetly-tiled length
Until the security guards ran him out at closing
And he sat down in the empty parking lot
And watched the bright moon over Wichita
Turn slowly to the ripest of pineapples.