Alexander, Who Used to be Rich last Sunday

weighed four hundred pounds and lived alone
he carried a gun in his hip pocket and he carried a flask
in his front left pocket and ate his dinner
out of the plastic compartments of a microwave dish
bent low in the carpeted corridor of his one bedroom apartment
he watched headlights flash against the walls like animal eyes
still in the quiet forest of his mind
lying in bed with curtains drawn it was Sunday and raining
all morning the wet pavement outside his window swelled
to the size of a Georgia peach the smell and the hairiness
of a wet crotch he played Van Morrison tunes and cleaned his gun
in love he was thinking of a girl at the gas station

she called him darling when he paid cash for beef jerky
she had black bobbed hair with huge hoop rings in her ears

swelled to the size of a can huge with botulism
because I remember a story about a family in Mexico
who ran a grocery store and had a bad batch of canned pears
distended like an exotic pregnancy and the woman
with her dog who bought the fruit and ate it and died
(or it the woman selling the fruit in her store
when Alexander walked in and bought a case of Keystone and walked out)

bid farewell to the cracked floors and the old sofa
big in the back corner of the pale room and farewell to
the hairy table and the clean lines of the plates and forks
when he with his big hands took hold of the double barreled gun
and did something none must have heard about not at least for a while
until they found him when they knocked and he didn’t come
or rather when they opened the door and there he was and that was it
really nothing left to salvage so with a barrel of gas and a flame
they burned the building from the inside, burned out the smell
until at last the gundpowder explosions and the alcohol flames
burned Alexander out so you couldn’t tell