I don’t have much to say on this poem except that no one wants to publish it, and so I’ll put it here as one more frantic kick against the system that has our president, in all his power, shouting into the ether: “Open the F*ckin’ Strait, you crazy b*stards, or you’ll be living in Hell.”
A poem for this dying, cruel world.
American Atrocities (Two Interjections)
Today I am
angry:
angry as the fowl
quickened from its
still waters
by the bruise
of the rifle’s butt
against a broad-
breasted man.
Angry that my collapses
are so late in coming,
have come at all,
to my grotto of clear
calm.That with the break of day
came in its wake
the history of the tide,
how it reached back up
and in from long
recession
and all memory
of its high water
lines faded, so soft.But me, (not fowl),
I can mull.
That a gun is a gun is a gun
to a snipe
is not so easy to one like me
who saw it once in peace
and only now
has hunted
its calamities down.[My father
on the stretch of land
fronting marsh
took the shotgun
and rang out
twice perfect precision
the clay pigeons,
never shooting
a thing that bleeds.][We interject
to bring this news:
‘you crazy bastards
you’ll be living in hell.’]
The clay will rain heavy
upon the fields of democracy.So I’ll write this,
if not an apology, a filling
of the void,
that which never happens:
the safety latch,
the jam,
the failure to extract,
the angry old man
so angry
that his day has been ruined
has taken no fowl home.
