The night air like a cheese, perfumed with sea water
A blocky, leaky, laggy cheese coating us all
We the three of us tramp through Panama City
Selling fake insurance policies for a dollar to
The tourists

The cops roust us here and there, upon catching sight of seersucker suits
A tighty, sticky, stocky kind of faded brown material
Each of us is having the time of his life, or the other’s
Our last night in this foreign city before we ship out
To Vietnam

I remember the fire-hanging hair, weaved together on the head
Of the bouncy, busty, bubbling night club stripper
She seemed as if I had known her a dozen years or more
Like I’m the kind of person who would forget my
Own sister

I ignite, stepping out into the dark city, with a bursting ejaculation of life
A creamy, glowy, semeny outburst of the soul
The three of us, friends from children, sharing a final night
Before we’re raped and swept away by the bony fingers of time
The grave

Would we ever meet again, my eyes seem to ask, these gentle souls and I?
The chummy, brotherly, buddies of my youth and I?
If this night scatters under the eye of the sun, driving us into tomorrow
Will the foreign wars and cruelty of men butcher us and erase us from
History?

This poem is to these paper cutouts in my past, loved faces who might have dispelled
Like wispy, smoky, ghostly incense that may or may not have ever burned
By chance we meet again at a high school reunion of all places, go Barnacles
And they sob at my poetic recount, though everyone I read it for found the semen part
A little too nauseating