Your smile is your friend

No matter how much pain you bear

A smile on your face

On the reflection of a mirror

Will strengthen you

A situation may live
for
  A  Moment
  A   Day
  An Year

But not Life Long

Fight the good fight

I can not find the letter mother left me four days
before her death. I read it once and then placed

it in a cardboard box like you might a dull
knife or a ******* tin. The letter is

a part me, like Van Gogh’s severed
ear was to him. I want the letter

like love or sight; the way bone
                               needs marrow.

red blue
and
green
water lilies
unfold
and
move the
wind parade
through
our
temple souls

You have slaughtered my kind without
justification and planted red mums
to line the new concrete sidewalk
to your church; Sundays,
as you traipse our roots
we will listen to your
sanctimonious
secrets.

Some are lissome, jowly,
blossomed or pocked,  teeth

of old horses—eyes white as flour,
a few clubfoot with sisters

pregnant as October gourds.  Not
Norman Rockwell’s Americans,

but they are us and live in lopsided
bungalows with leaky roofs,

heaved sidewalks, bare
refrigerators.