a stones throw from freedom

so, I toss
aimless

wear down the wick,
burn into the small hours

til' the sun basks

suppose I dream in absolutes

from the ceiling, a billion petals;
rose consorting with the floor

come to smother me

the sweet balm,
that last-ditch adamance
the last scent on my breath

do I wake in a sweat
with reason to?

waking being my first misstep
walking penrose stairs

I feel it

suppose I pose more premonition
knowing what I might

a hairs breadth

so
aimless

I dream that I touch it

Some in my family say
Uncle Sam was my salvation
when I was a young man
hell, maybe so, I don’t know
but he kept me out of jail
and paid for my education
which is how I found myself
in West Memphis, Arkansas
surveying Indian mounds
that some fool professors thought
were put there by the Choctaw
but I knew they’d got it wrong
all along, it was the Mississippians
which makes perfect sense if you think
on it considering where they put ‘em
but I digress, I must confess it
was my fondness for backroad bars
and blues guitars carved from wood
of crosses burnt by drunks in hoods
and strings plucked by calloused fingers
of old men with shoulders slumped
like sagging barns and Ford pickups
you find out in them parts, singing
songs about long gone women, all
kinds of aching age old pains lingering
enough to make a man’s heart rain
until the US Army Corps of Engineers
blew the levy’s to send those tears
out across cotton fields and mounds
I know the Choctaw didn’t build.

There’s a kind of grief
in a long leaf pine
with a scar cut deep
in its bark from lightning
that shines beneath
a winter’s moonlight
all alone out there
down by the water
like a man in a wheelchair
grieving for a daughter
at the end of the dock
hard and gray
old as the rocks
and cold **** waves
that break in time
along this god forsaken
piece of coastline.