Finally Run Aground

She sailed out
pretty as a peach
the decks shone in
a white April sun and
the port on the river, the
piers shifting up and down on
glassy
green water,
she waited every night
for the sleek, painted
barque to sail home.

The storms of time will
scupper steel
and rot the osage orange.

We loved her and she would still
haul in fish, a sight every morning leaving the
harbor.

And it broke me,
it broke me when
we saw her
leak and groan
and we swore at her, cursed her
and at night winced, remembering.

We crashed a beer bottle on her hull.

She'll sail now only in my memories.

They ask me 'Why do you look like that?
Are you okay?"

And I say "Y'all, I'm just thinkin'. I'm sorry"

And she'll be carrying me over whitecaps,
soaring under granite bluffs and
making me feel free.

Now, the anchor chain is
cold
on my foot.

Dawn

The sunrises
Are my favorite part
Of an otherwise
Soul-deadening and nerve-numbing
Job.

The stars are so clear
In their selenium black-blue when
The young horizon
Begins to burnish and braze to
Brass, copper, orange.

Hours before the sun ever
Peeks above and
Blazes furiously, avenging
The cold and blindness of
Night, the sky melts and
Oozes into color, still full of stars,
Still overseen by the Moon,
And my favorite is the hour
When the bright faces of
Luna and Sol share the sky
Like good siblings born of the same
Light.

Hoarfrost shimmers in winter
And dances in our headlights
Pulling over the crunching
White gravel.
I shiver leaving the truck
For the cold factory
And I breathe deep the morning air
Before I plunge into
Work.

ACAB and Mawma sez

Someone hollered "whoo!" Across the river

I had driven myself here
To kill myself.

Fortunately The Dam was closed.

Because i had intended to walk along the low side.
The high side was the favorite, because of the depth. But i knew
There was so little
One could drown in.
So i walked
Along the lefthand
Low side
Because i also knew
That splatting oneself against the
Spillway
Slope
Was much more humane than
Drowning in the
Deep
Catfish
Dark,
And i had in mind my people,

Maybe they'd run their imaginations
Through.

Maybe there'd be horror but *gasp*
Also sympathy

Let's not go that far.
So I chugged down a bottle
And i drove as close
As i could
To where i could jump
Into that wide
Pure
Clean
Tennessee

i chugged that bottle down
And the wind cut cold
Shivering
Through me

And way,
Way across the slough
I heard a faint:
"Whoooh!
With a certain
Southron enthusiasm. And it said:

Don't give up!
But drink 'at likker,
Does 'at make sense?

And as I
Screwed the top
Back on the bottle

I thought:
Maybe so.

I elbowed the door on
My truck that
The cops broke
All the way home

And lived another day