God Damn (poem story)

 Dawn looked over the San Antonio Paris Premier Field of Hope Racetrack where the whores and drunks and shortrange refugees and other stubborn players and mentally-atuned gamblers were gathering to make their usual purchases and what else and feed the proverbial monkey for another day. Everything had the smell of hot dogs, freedom, coffee, whiskey. Some people were out walking their goats, pigs. Cats moved among the feet of people who'd never seen cats before. Silver light in the eyes of children. No one cold unless they wanted to be. 

Judge Hosseini washed his hands with religious sensuality in the North (October) men's room, getting soap underneath the nails and licking and chewing his lush cherry-lips. He has the queer, implacable confidence of a man who knows the realities of resurrection. 

Across... the Field of Hope Racetrack, Ray Walsh (assumed name) was moving up to the frontgate, easy of step and hand as he gave the woman in the glass booth his money to get inside. He'd driven straight from his American therapist, a little giddy with confidence, the sensation in his stomach soft as rabbits dreams. He made his way through the crowd without suspicion, his fingers grazing through the hair, ears of occasional farm animals, tiny, stealth cats brushing past his legs. When he got to his preferred ticket-station, he took out the brown wallet, paid out $28 for various racing tickets, then, tickets-in-hand, Ray wandered casually toward the center of the  San Antonio Paris Premier, where he had a clearview of the one-third mile by one-third mile oval racecourse and the smell of lunch and human intoxication went to his peculiar heart and he searched among the stands for Hosseini in that wild sea of beggars, misfits, the ruins of a living world in which many of us cannot acknowledge which is real and which simply feels real. 

"You're a fisher among men," Hosseini said as Walsh made his way down the row of chairs. Semi-private for its distance from the push of the crowd. "I'm like anybody else," he said, taking his seat. 

"You have your tickets?" 

"Yes. You have bought yours?" 

"Yes. It is good to still be in the game." 

(See the horses being put into the starting-gate, the froth of competition something vaguely alien.) 

"I like this place." 

"It's my favorite in the world so far." 

"Not so many guns on the streetcorner. And the sex is very good." 

"Did you see your therapist, today?" 

"She scares me a little, sometimes. She says I have a fragile & inexcusable ego. She says I have to pay my debts." 

"We all have to pay our debts, Ray. Or else why would we be here." 

"I can't persuade her of such things. Her body makes an energy like I'm inside a helicopter. You know, nervous and crazy." 

(The boom of the launching-gun and the horses breaking their hooves upon the desolate, crackling soil and the speed of their projection where they rush into a world only the horses can truly see...) 

"I would go to see a therapy but I prefer the hookers in Times Square." 

"Your father never warned you against the disease?" 

"My father never taught me anything." 

The horses bang so fast you can't imagine the structure of their souls. Like if coffee did its own tax-returns or pumpkins could be fomented into alcohol. Humble children stealing cars in the name of something nobler. 

....They continue watching the horses, whispering their confessions and dreams, and the horses going, going, like wolves, like wolves: it reminds me of some tea I drank out of a teacup, with a saucer, the shape of everything alien and the light spreading wider overhead, where the enlightened ones study us from the clouds, their oblivion like an ocean, that would have us, one and all.

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