Plainsfield Wisconsin 1957
He parks the truck outside
the barn. The upholstery
is split where his daddy's
Remington leans between
the dash and the wheel well.
He works the hook behind
the thick achilles just
above the heel. There
is gray callus like a horseshoe
on the bottom of the foot.
He takes off his stained brown
work gloves and looks at
his cracked hands. There
is liniment in the house.
He inserts the padlock through
the clasp on the barn door, rubs
the stubble on his chin, looks
up at the November sky. He
figures on snow.
He walks from the barn to the
house, hears the frosted soil
crackle under his boots, thinks
of the sound the hook made.
He sits at the kitchen table and
looks through the window
at tan corn stalks in the
distance. He opens a can
of peaches.
My favorite poem
My favorite poem was written by a man
hanging in a mesh basket inches
from his bed his belly pregnant with
liver his skin his eyes turned the
color of kiwi him reading the words
on the wall as he stared past me
his cracked lips mouthing the words
as he wrote them holding not a pen
but a morphine-drip dispenser
incessantly squeezing out the
Morse with his thumb.
Breakthrough
I heard yesterday that Frank
the security guard at Wood Street Commons
shot himself and
Robert the Messenger who
told me said
it got to be too much for him.
Said they laid him out on
a bed of white carnations,
put a carnation
in his hand.
This morning they had Sinatra
playing at the coffee shop,
I've always hated
that phony bastard's flat voice,
yet it'll stick with me
throughout the day,
luck be a lady tonight.
Seems to me a poem is like a
spiderweb,
or maybe like that wire mesh
they used to insert between
the plates of plexiglass
in the windows of seclusion rooms,
holding the glass together
however splintered,
never letting us reach
the other side.
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