» Poetry
Two Poems
Witness Statement
And, behold, in the year
of unencumbered plague
those who trafficked in wickedness
did so on palatial golf courses.
An orphan cried for succor
and received spit.
Nothing of this was new
or profound, only more naked.
And, lo, I fed my son a breakfast
bar on a dying planet.
And on a dying planet
the wicked watered
my son’s playground with poisons.
They hallowed his oceans with lead.
Tell me what should I have done
but bathe bread in peanut butter
mince Flintstones in a cup of cola.
And, lo, the wicked thought only
of my boy as a horsetail dreams
of flies. His chest rose and fell
as we both tacked the garbage
truck rumbling its track.
In this was no sin.
In this was only another
form of hunger: the truckness
of the truck begetting wonder
begetting want. Oh, felt my boy
with every rattling atom.
And the wicked kenneled
a brown boy so like my son.
I said, I am sickened.
I said, I will maim you
with my claws before you
take their boy, my boy whose laugh
turns this truck ripe with refuse
to some radiant blessing.
Anubis at the DMV
Let me be blunt:
fate is no whim.
It is the voice of
a thousand bureaucrats intoning
now serving 554.
If diligence is a knife
you are our bread.
if service is a repeating decimal
a herd of digits flashed to life
you’re dead last.
Ultimo.
The sarcophagal cero.
Each attendant is a monolith
in a desert you wander
an hour, a lifetime.
Who can know?
The intervals grow
immeasurable.
Think of a cat
toying mindlessly with a string
an entire day
bored
somnambular.
Past the grave
vice or virtue is simply
the dust we brush off.
Let it accumulate.
Let the carpet fiber
crack beneath your feet
Now you want to know
how much longer
a day, a year, a league.
Like all dictators
I simply push the beads
across, then back.
Who am I
to enumerate
your wait time?
Who to tell you
how to spend your death?