Carlos: A Sheen Sestina, by Tom Dinard

With stern, defiant career eyes, beaming live, straight from the Lodge,
He spoke of his glory in the service of this week’s goddesses,
But like tigers sensing the freshest, warmest ooze of blood
Without noticing the once-brilliant promise of its crimson sheen,
He fought on, safe in the knowledge of his self-prescribed cure,
Thrilling legions of onlookers with exclamation points of winning.

“The joke is on him if he claims to be winning,”
You say, cozy in the leather sofa of your suburban lodge.
“He doesn’t know how to consider, approach or even dream of a cure.
Look at this loon, with the addled nerve to call whores goddesses.
Does reality disintegrate entirely when blinded by celebrity sheen?
Better him than me, to have the last ounce of sanity drained from the blood.”

Once he broke from a sad platoon, one bold shot spilling all of evil’s blood.
He followed his father, another role from another war, this one without winning.
Award season came: a stone’s statue, and for him the golden sheen,
And the ovations roared on from the penthouse of the critic’s lodge.
The pick of the profession, perfect for the screen’s grand goddesses,
If mediocrity was a worldwide epidemic, he was the All-Amerian cure.

Being “different,” he must have believed, would lead him to the cure,
For the many ills of his Hollywood, and he inked that pact in blood,
Paying — but why would he pay? — for time spent with would-be goddesses,
Paying for a full section of stadium seats, targeting a home run, but not winning,
Paying, always paying, he became the head of the buck stuck on the wall in the lodge,
To be admired from afar — not close enough to see the rust behind the sheen.

A young gun, a hot shot, a major league career buffed to a high-quality sheen,
And for every understandable misstep, the well-publicized, reassuring cure.
The parties got bigger, wild things wilder on the top floor of the lodge
Where no one even cringes as the first or last sights of blood.
He might have still been young, but even an old man could call this winning –
Sleeping in by the coast, power lunches, romantic dinners with gettable goddesses.

Now he gets what he can, offering expected riches for applicable goddesses,
The seven-minutes-a-pop hotel-room wives broken behind that caked-on sheen.
He scoffs at the amateurs, the lemmings who don’t know shit about winning,
Saying there’s never been anything known as a timeworn, well-earned cure.
The key to human greatness, he says, lies in the double helix of his blood,
And with that surge of built-in innovation, they keys to earth’s most exalted lodge.

Is it really all there? The goddesses, the valley down from that sober lodge?
Does the concept of winning mean you don’t even need a cure?
Or are we all a tiny piece of Sheen, linked by everything but blood?

***

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