You never left.
     As if you ever could.
Mama's boy and broken football star
I find you passed out cold on the kitchen floor
In bourbon's dream of extinction,
     And in the taverns of Pawtucket
And along the walkways by the granite canals
That the Irish built,
Slouching at dawn away from The Acre,
     And here perhaps especially
On the bridges where you learned to fly
On scrawny wings above the Merrimac,
Looking down millstacks
And caressing the broken glass in the snow
On tenement roofs.
     So in your hometown
...