just a man
drag off a cigarette smirk
a walking shell game
snake in a can
so backwards in life
one questions
reports of his death
yet
he would crookedly smile
calling it
legend
just a man
drag off a cigarette smirk
a walking shell game
snake in a can
so backwards in life
one questions
reports of his death
yet
he would crookedly smile
calling it
legend
This morning’s coffee
tastes like resignation,
however,
I’m in the mood for redemption.
so he took her like an animal
but my father’s ghost wept
so she went to the men
like a good American
good people don’t want to believe
in visionaries good or bad
especially when you have red clay mud
starved stabbed scabbed over and over
on your grandmother’s dress from being raped just like her
from ft. Sumter to Wounded Knee
he’d never seen that color red come out of a living fertility statue
my veil is torn
the dog is dead
the natives have resumed their drumbeat
last night
shots rang out
slicing August’s midnight miasma
a quivering queen city listened
as Cherokee bells
echoed over cobblestones
black swan feathers topping lost hopes
filling horse-drawn funeral carriages
eighteen shot
four dead
blood pooling at the base
seven screaming hills
four shootings in Cincinnati
ninety fatal minutes
national news coverage
backlit red images
of our violent infection
suffer do we
these slings & arrows
whispering sacred prayers
to a god unlistening
please make
every bullet fired
explode into a spray
of evening primroses
I’ve done my share. Coast to coast.
I’ve done my share of poet husbands, too.