Tuesday, January 22, 2019

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.

Tuesday, January 15, 2019

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