Frost on the Windshield

Poor Kirbyville is mostly closed this morning
The cinder-block bakery is empty
And the only fast-foodery’s not yet open
Its neon tubes still dark against the stars

But the stop ‘n’ rob is busy enough
The gas pumps serving as anchorages
For trucks and boats, some headed to the lake
After taking on coffee and gasoline

And sausage-biscuits greased and slammed, and wrapped
In yellow paper of such painful sadness

For Ngo Dinh Diem

No flame eternal burns over your lost grave
Unknown beneath an hourly parking lot
Or maybe out back among the garbage cans
No guards of honor pace in mirrored boots

Forth and back in mummery choreographed
Along a field of honor’s concrete walk
No busloads of tourists leave gift-shop wreaths
No bands or speeches mark your martyrdom

Nor would you need them
Nor would you want them

For your small flame is on an Altar set

Sergeant Schultz Saw Everything

This sad world needs another Sergeant Schultz
That merry miles ponderosus who
Carried his rifle like a walking stick
And celebrated strudel instead of glory  
His innocent joy repudiated
The burning-soul ******* of war
In seeing nothing he saw everything
Through ordinary men living in hope
The liturgy of daily happiness -
This sad world needs another Sergeant Schultz

Not a Good Comrade

No man is free if he gives up himself
And disappears into sad howlingness
Subsumed in sinking, shrieking subservience
Thrall-teed in the overseer’s livery

A label on a shabby baseball cap
A programmed pixel smeared across a screen
A rusty caltrop cast into the road
A shifted pea under a shuffled thimble

As crowd, as mass, as demographic noise -
No man is free if he gives up himself

Upon Learning that the Southern Poverty Law Center Maintains an Enemies List

Does anyone maintain a list of friends?

The construction flagman who smiles and waves
The neighbor’s boy who visits for a game of chess
The Friday morning coffee commandos
The waitress who flirts with all her old men
The helpful sackboy at the grocery store
The man who repairs your air-conditioner
The nurse-practitioner who makes you all better
The crossing guard who keeps the children safe

Does anyone maintain a list of friends?

The First Sunday of Advent

A calling-crow-cold sky ceilings the world,
Lowering the horizon to itself
All silvery and grey upon the fields
Of pale, exhausted, dry-corn-stalk summer

The earth is tired, the air is cold, the dawn
False-promises nothing but an early dusk
As calling-cold-crows crowd the world with noise,
Loud-gossiping from tree to ground to sky

Soon falling frosts and fields of ice will fold
Even those fell, foolish fowls into the depths
Of dark creek bottoms where dim ancient oaks
Hide darkling birds from wild blue northern winds

Crows squawk of Advent disapprovingly,
As Advent-autumn drifts to Christmastide
When all the good of the seasonal year
Then warms and charms the house, the hearth,  the heart.

How Lovely Not to be in Jail Tonight

How lovely not to be in jail tonight
And have to share a small and smelly space
Under an eternal fluorescent light
With a dude who don’t like yer race or yer face

How grand to have a bed that’s enough
With sheets and pillows and blankets all clean
And not a bare mattress sour-stained and rough
Against a wall of cinder blocks in green

And howlings from a soul who has lost life’s fight -
How thankful not to be in jail tonight