ODE TO WAYNE ROONEY

Young-ass, no-neck-having, endorsed out the wazoo
undecipherable governor. Captain England in the gun
range, mumbler, shy statistician, grotesque ducats
in trade ploys and blackmail jousting in the Sunfor libel tournaments when all my man wants
is to field a volley from midfield, absorb it in some
turgidly benign way with swollen gravity and Howitzer
on the poor sap they've sentenced to deflect his meteors.

My man, Rooney, marquees the poise of a physicist
calibrating the Goalie Death Ray. His little black eyes
(almost too small for his cranium) like mediocre poppies
with aftertaste wallop. It's like you can almost spy the
deliberate assessment, the size-up this adolescent-plated
street arab has on his mind. And then he is known for chipping
it over goalies' heads when they venture out too far, forget
themselves in relation to the skirmish in play. And then he is
known for bringing the full hip wrath, the torque shoulder canon
the barrel-down carnivore, the lambasted targets, the pity of the
oxygen tank, the lameness of the metatarsals.