LET'S GET SOME (D-I-V-O-R-C-E JK)

Travis Bickle, you look so fine

In that tank top that I

Would lick your salt from it.

"You in the wife-beater," indeed!

Why, I ought to kick thar sonofabitch in the shins!

You don't have to like that I giggle

At your clutch of cut Black Eyed Susan.

If you don't climb Jacob's ladder

But rather ascend with me, well...

My liver, my liver

Is a lean green lover!

Oh, who is he I spy

In the head on patrol

Smiling evilly as he goes by,

Repeatedly, yet sane over and over again.

Are you what smote me as a child?

In 1988 a voice boomed my name aloud to me,

A woodblock print cloud heralding your birth. 

This, Marine, is my bliss and mirth:

It is the gleam in your eye -

A gleam unstinting, a true heart's shine...

[NOTE: This is a sibling poem to the earlier VOICES AND SHADOWS, an aw-shucks love poem if ever I write such. True love is yucky and gives you cooties, and that's a clinical diagnosis that Dr. Eichelberger himself can somehow bank on (villainy *doesn't* pay, it would appear 🤭)]