When Odysseus came back
Weaponless, friendless,
On Phaiacian charity,
Who'd pased up the chance
To live as the immortal gods,
He, the hero of every mid-life-crisis wet-dream --
The middle-aged adventurer,
Man of infinite resource,
Bedded and beloved of witches, nymphs and virgins --
Did he realize
That his accounts were in arrears
Everybody needed his social security number
And just the interest and penalties alone
Would have sunk the court of Agamemmnon?

But with his unconquerable prudence
Without any help from the Veterans' Administration
Or the TVAW
He set out to scout the situation
In all its Homeric outrage.
Only now the servant girls
Were calling Telemachus a faggot
Because he wouldn't sleep with them
And besides the suitors there were four insurance salesmen
Three investment counselors
Two bank touts
Half a dozen auditors from the IRS
And one or two hopeless young pups
Genuinely in love with an older woman.

So he gathered them and told them a tale,
Long, plausible, and utterly mendacious,
Worthy of a politician on trial and under oath,
Then mowed them all down
With Telemachus' Uzi.

Then he
The man never at a loss,
Who'd devised the Trojan Horse
And the first attempted section-eight
Mailed in a magnet with his tax return
And degaussed all the computers;
Rigged up the answering machine
To respond to calls at dinnertime
From hawkers for dubious charities, phone plans, and police organizations
With a casette tape he'd made
Of the Siren's song.

And as the rest of Hellas stood amazed
At the sight of bureaucrats starving in the street
Shallow young men transfixed to their telephones
And ambitious but unfeminine career women
Packing up for Lesbos,
He planted the oar
Before two young Ithacans sitting glued to their TV set
Then refitted one of the suitors' pleasure boats
With a sturdy mast and ocean-going keel,
Took all his tools and books
And supplies for a LONG voyage
And sailed off with his beautiful Penelope,
Telemachus,
The old nurse and the loyal swineherd,
And anyone else who wanted to come.

So now,
If you walk along the beach at Ithaca
-- Past the grave of faithful Argus --
Stepping carefully
Among the tarballs and the hypodermics,
Amid the strangled cries
Of twisted-beak seagulls attempting to fly
On spastic pinions, you can see
The pigs gone wild
A carload of inspectors from Internal Revenue
And the same wire-service photographers
Who airbrushed out the hammer and sickle
On the banner behind Winnie Mandela.
And the only question
In the bright sunshine, is
Which one is which?