Al Capone and the Crack of Doom

One evening in the old country
Capone made out of his villa
half soused on Jamaican rum
and took the hillside path
to the edge of the crack of doom
with the empty bottle in hand.
At the edge the air was stiller
than in the smoking valley,
he looked back from where he'd come
where the earth's dull hearth
had let the August fires consume
the black olive trees, the laurel tinder.

Now wild sound escaped the fissure,
a devil leapt out of the black crack
with white eyes wriggling in mid-air
only to leap like liquid back
into the bottle, and settle slickly there.
Al Capone, forty one years grown
fat in mind, afraid of Communists
and George Moran, in old Italy alone,
riddled by craziness and syphilis,
looked into the belching chasm
and formed his heart into a fist.

He drank the devil like cheap gin.
Once the devil is in, he's in.
The crack of doom yawned wide
as Alphonse let the old boy inside,
as the blood boiled his bones,
as a choir of screeching saxophones
came crashing in to break his neck,
as his trousers filled with dreck,
as at the last limit of human pain
a tommy-gun exploded in his brain,
and he fell a shadow to the ground.