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
Category: war
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Pocahontas
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she kept her honor
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
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Ha!! Me, too…
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Poof* Take MY water
my parents were screaming
at each other
in Baptist curses
doors slamming
phones torn asunder
sounds of a home splitting apart at the roofbeams
my father throwing the floor model television out the front door
and one frightened sister
smuggling me out a bedroom window to another protective sister
that may not have all happened on the same night
it was so long ago &
this wasn’t constant
not your average weeknight at the Young’s house
but it’s always the first time
that matters most
amidst the curiosities
of my yet to be packed up
roll top desk
i found a diamond bracelet
you had given me
hiding in one of
the apothecary drawers
it reminded me immediately
how you waged
war by candlelight
instinctively i pulled the pin
on that gauche grenade
lobbing the tacky bauble
into the goose shit encircled pond
behind the house
your weaponry
is not welcome here
anymore
i put on some water for tea
then decided to mop the floors
of our new little nest
before the furniture gets carried in
before the rest of our lives happen
Murphy’s Oil Soap
water and sunshine into a bucket
carried through the echoing emptiness
of what will be
over original hardwood
placed there in 1941
i love to clean
the ritual of it
i write in my thoughts as i work
images painting themselves
into spaces around my gentle humming
spreading wet across the grain
seeing hands that mopped this floor
before me
wives husbands
fathers mothers
lovers and
put-upon teenagers
oh this house
has a history
built the year
the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor
it’s all still there
nailed down memories
layers of time entombed in wax
someone stood in that living room and heard
we dropped the bomb
we landed at Normandy
of a flag raised in Iwo-Jima
Kennedy was dead
Vietnam was a lost cause only good
for folded flags being handed to weeping mothers
Nixon was a crook
Reagan and John Lennon had been shot
the Berlin wall had fallen
i heard first steps
crying babies
crying widows
joyous laughter
say cheese
wine glasses clinking together
realizing with a smile
this floor is mine
the foundation of a family
and i will love it
then
the teapot
began to whistle
if mothers’ tears
could build palaces
the whole of humanity
would live as kings
my generation had no great war
until the towers fell
and the government invented one
then we were told
it’s not our fight
beyond the departures gate
at the airport
our struggle is removing our shoes
and grabby TSA agents
we never grew a victory garden
we never salvaged all our metal to make bullets
or watched the soldierly Vietnam death toll
march across the bottom of our television screens
we were raised by Atari systems, Pop Rocks, Sweet Valley High books,
and Bob Barker’s skinny microphone
so forgive me, my fellow
generationally x’d out americans
if i don’t give a shit
about your opinions on the upcoming election