You Need a License to Go to Cuba

you need a government license
to go ninety miles off the mainland

to an estranged island
frozen in 1959
’57 Chevy’s healthier there than here
voodoo catholic deities fix what you didn’t know
staring stoic from shiny reconstructed dashboards

Meyer Lansky still lives there
snookering dominoes at dawn
waiting for Castro to cough in the shadows

hotels with cracked plaster
and a smart pomade at the front desk
bleached tear-stained postcard villages
sun dried sandpapered and rough from time
soft as the Caribbean breeze
hard as the bite of dark local rum
offered up and drunk
at the feet of a sultry Jesus
who bleeds molasses
and does the meringuè

you need to be stamped or canadian
to go there
or make love to a diplomat
who will whisper “pocos nadas” in your
hairy Norte Americano ear

Cuba is way gone and back again
home of sugar tobacco steam
rum you’d drink with Mary Magdalene
six hour diatribes from comrade Fidel
the coolest heat and
the hottest cool
it hasn’t changed

we need a license
but we’re coming anyway


by the boy poets offshore, way offshore