ODE TO BALLACK

Brother, if I were Michael Ballack, I'd kick
back in the Poconos or the Pyrenees with a carton
of Long Island Iced Teas. I'd move to the south
of Germany, a village with the tallest tower
by a lake with gigantic carpenter bees. I'd
teach Goethe in a rural high school and Volvo
my daughter to recitals of Carmen. I'd live in
track suits, trainers, and logoless cotton shirts.
Maybe there are some honors not granted for hunger
of those honors makes for another hunger that is
possibly more essential for futbol sainthood.
In other words, watch Drogba and Ballack in
the sitcom, Chelsea Blues, in which they
protagonize two undercover cops in East London
with atrocious moustaches and polyester bellbottom
revolvers, smacking the crap out of balon
making it squeal like airbus swine, like a greezy
rat that's been beaten with phonebooks in question rooms.
I'd start a proto-kraut rawk musical junta and go on tour
with my model wife (different from standard wife-models)
until there is no hotel in Majorca which will render
us shelter. I'd start a University of Power, a Cathedral
of Brunt, a Montessori Compound for Teutonic Bruins.
Brother, this Ballack guy, is prone to head but
I.C.B.M.s into the farthest pocket on corner kicks.
He cracks balon like woodsman with vector knowledge.
There is no one can stop the laser-pointer once Ballack
lays it on you like the Lord's unequivocal retribution,
like a black rain that refuses to go into the gutters.
Brother, the Cup in Africa will miss its Ballack;
its balast of earned versus fortuned-upon. How, some
times, you must go to bed in a hungry palace to wake
up in the Turret of the Fatherland.