You can hide
All your pain
Behind a smiling mask

But you still have
A breaking point

When it's reached
A thousand masks aren't enough
To hide your tears

It was harrowing,
the way the darkness
crept into her cage
the sudden change
in demeanor
no longer
a will to share,
the teeth marks
she left behind
in the calves
of leg
the loss of mind,
employment,
fragment and bones,
the very fabric
of home lay
torn and bleeding,
her red ribbon muzzle
tear stained in
separation

It was harrowing,
the madness
pulling apart
at the seam of
consciousness,
and then
she disappeared,
as if she never began,
and all that
is left of her,
are her
blackbird eyes.

An affliction that's everlasting
lives lie in ruins in the allies of agony in the slums of misery
Reflections of shattered families reflecting through shattered glass
Screams of lost souls echo while the fall through the cracks in the pavement.

Written by Keith Edward Baucum

he eschewed the label,
“Native American,” for he was *****,
and he wasn't ashamed he liked his spirits
dollar wine worked as well

cirrhosis was a family trait
though he didn't learn the word until an army doc
admonished him, saying he would earn the curse
by 45, if he kept it up

and he did, even more after that crazy
Asian war, where he killed a half dozen men
they called yellow, though to Walter, they looked
to be his emaciated brown cousins

he could stand tall, straight
with a pint of rot gut in him, burning
his belly, but not causing his head to spin
though it helped him block them out:

those he did not know; those he
slaughtered like lambs with the gun they issued him;
those who inhabited a space just behind his eyes
whenever they closed, night or day

someone found him, in his pickup bed
dead from exposure, from too many years
on the bottle, too many dreams he tried to drown
and too many ghosts to haunt his nights

Gallup, New Mexico, 1999