The legend was in the way he said legend

Like ripping off a hubcap with his teeth-nail
He’d crapped Tom Cruises bigger than unicorns

Scored reviews on get to the chopper & plinthed

the ivory 
Too young to think he was that old anyways

He’d pitied the fools of his own citations
The conference on an ending a means to an end

Or a means 
The End
Weekends he roasted chestnuts just to say he had both
He’d never stopped to ask about the father

on the edge of the soccer field
The man who played Ivan Drago

to his USofA attitude
The way A for academic could slouch off a shadow

Scoff at the idea of Bali but fall in-love with a Harley
He was Jackie Channing his way into old age with all the soft edges

of a post Governator sequel 
Who comes up with this shit anymore

he was beginning to ask 
After he’d met himself in the bar

too cheap to shout
He just wanted to get to the top of the building

Once there he was too scared to look down
Fingers gesticulating in an intext action

A hero’s journey maladaptive to the theory
Micro-anything made him feel insecure
Claude was never coming back
He was exacting his own expendables

Dissertations on an escape plan 
Made nervous by the patience of an instagram tile
Who would quote him and where
Whatever said was masc and mass

A return to the rush hour of a soccer field

A point scoring activity that transcended

The league
Ivory or otherwise
Even then he’d had a penchant for obscurity

that made his old man pen his own eulogy
Look at the blade and you miss a kick

Treat your head like the goal if you have to
He was beginning to wonder if

could you still call a trip to Gunnedah a holiday
Like father like son before him

but Western had different connotations then
The question only mattered to his ex-wife

and that was part of the problem
As he tried to pull the f.u. out of funding 
The yippee-ki-yay W.N.F’d Christmas

Turned the faculty against him
How many absent father figures

did it take to fill out a panel
Snake-eyes combing through ten years of endnotes
He had to accept the true-lies:

abattoir & administrations were not

the same thing
Of course, all he’d wanted was a world’s best coffee cup

Enough oomph to split open an envelope
Whatever hay-day was a hey dad
His last PhD nibbled the apple before the thought

of running half nude down the street after a wheelie-bin 
In the end the affair had seemed like an accident

A mockumentary where the bullet was named Brendan
He was always writing another paper
Though the thesis was no longer a muscle car 
His collar & its perpetual shade of cobalt

that he derived from the well 
A golden sunset & roll credits 
He was named after the dog