The first settlers to the area called the Lumber River Drowning Creek. The river got its name for its dark, swift-moving waters. In 1809, the North Carolina state legislature changed the name of Drowning Creek to the Lumber River. The headwaters are still referred to as Drowning Creek.

Three p.m. on a Sunday.
Anxiously hungry, I stay dry, out of the pool’s cold water,
taking the light, dripping into my pages.
A city with a white face blank as a bust
peers over my shoulder.
Wildflowers on the roads. Planes circle from west,
come down steeply and out of sight.
A pinkness rises in my breast and arms:
wet as the drowned, my eyes sting with sweat.
Over the useless chimneys a bank of cloud piles up.
There is something terrible in the sky, but it keeps breaking.
Another is dead. Fentanyl. Sister of a friend, rarely seen.
A hand reaches everywhere to pass over eyes and mouths.
A glowing wound opens in heaven.
A mirror out of doors draws a gyre of oak seeds no one watches,
in the clear pool now sunless and black.

Bitter water freezes the muscles and I am far from shore.
I paddle in the shallows, near the wooden jail.
The water reflects a taut rope,
feet hanging in the breeze singing mercy
at the site of the last public hanging in the state.
A part-white fugitive with an extorted confession,
loved by the poor, dumb enough to get himself captured,
lonely on this side of authority: a world he has never lived in
foisting itself on the world he has -
only now, to steal his drunken life, then gone again.

1871 - Henderson Oxendine, one of the notorious gang of outlaws who for some time have infested Robeson County, N. C., committing ****** and robbery, and otherwise setting defiance to the laws, was hung at Lumberton, on Friday last in the presence of a large assemblage. His execution took place a very few days after his conviction, and his death occurred almost without a struggle.

Today, the town square collapses as if scorched
by the whiskey he drank that morning to still himself,
folds itself up like Amazing Grace is finished.
A plinth is laid
in the shadow of his feet, sticky with pine,
here where the water sickens with roots.
Where the canoe overturned. Where the broken oar floated and fell.
Where the snake lives, and teethes on bark,
waiting for another uncle.

Where the tobacco waves near drying barns rusted like horseshoes
and cotton studs the ground like the cropped hair of the buried.
Where schoolchildren take the afternoon
to trim the kudzu growing between the bodies of slaves.
Where appetite is met with flood and fat
and a clinic for the heart.
Where barges took chips of tar to port,
for money that no one ever saw.

Tar sticks the heel but isn’t courage.
Tar seals the hulls -
binds the planks -
builds the road.
Tar, fiery on the tongue, heavy as bad blood in the family -
dead to glue the dead together to secure the living.
Tar on the roofs, pouring heat.
Tar is a dark brown or black viscous liquid of hydrocarbons and free carbon,
obtained from a wide variety of organic materials
through destructive distillation.
Tar in the lungs will one day go as hard as a five-cent candy.

Liberty Food Mart
Cheapest Prices on Cigarettes
Parliament $22.50/carton
Marlboro $27.50/carton

The white-bibbed slaughterhouse Hmong hunch down the steps
of an old school bus with no air conditioner,
rush into the cool of the supermarket.
They pick clean the vegetables, flee with woven bags bulging.
What were they promised?
Air conditioning.
And what did they receive?
Chickenshit on the wind; a dead river they can't understand
with a name it gained from killing.

Truth:
A man was flung onto a fencepost and died in a front yard down the street.
A girl with a grudge in her eyes slipped a razorblade from her teeth and ended recess.
I once saw an Indian murdered for stealing a twelve-foot ladder.
The red line indicating heart disease grows higher and higher.
The red line indicating cardiovascular mortality grows higher and higher.
The red line indicating motor vehicle deaths grows higher and higher.
I burn with the desire to leave.

The stories make us full baskets of dark. No death troubles me.
Not the girl's blood, inert, tickled by opiates,
not the masked arson of the law;
not the smell of drywall as it rots,
or the door of the safe falling from its hinges,
or the chassis of cars, airborne over the rise by the planetarium,
three classmates plunging wide-eyed in the river’s icy arc –
absent from prom, still struggling to free themselves from their seatbelts -
the gunsmoke at the home invasion,
the tenement bisected by flood,
the cattle lowing, gelded
by agriculture students on a field trip.

The air contains skin and mud.
The galvanized barns, long empty, cough up
their dust of rotten feed, dry tobacco.
Men kneel in the tilled rows,
to pick up nails off the ground
still splashed with the blood of their makers.

You Never Sausage a Place
(You’re Always a ****** at Pedro’s!)
South of the Border – Fireworks, Motel & Rides
Exit 9: 10mi.

Drunkards in Dickies will tell you the roads are straight enough
that the drive home will not bend away from them.
Look in the woods to see by lamplight
two girls filling each other's mouths with smoke.
Hear a friendly command:
boys loosening a tire, stuck in the gut of a dog.
Turn on the radio between towns of two thousand
and hear the tiny voice of an AM preacher,
sharing the airwaves of country dark
with some chords plucked from a guitar.
Taste this water thick with tannin
and tell me that trees do not feel pain.
I would be a mausoleum for these thousands
if I only had the room.

I sealed myself against the flood.
Bodies knock against my eaves:
a clutch of cats drowned in a crawlspace,
an old woman bereft with a vase of pennies,
her dead son in her living room costumed as the black Jesus,
the ***** oil of a Chinese restaurant
dancing on top of black water.
A flow gauge spins its tin wheel
endlessly above the bloated dead,
and I will pretend not to be sick at dinner.

Misery now, a struggle ahead for Robeson County after flooding from Hurricane Matthew
LUMBERTON
After years of things leaving Robeson County – manufacturing plants, jobs, payrolls, people – something finally came in, and what was it but more misery?

I said a prayer to the city:
make me a figure in a figure,
solvent, owed and owing.
Take my jute sacks of wristbones,
my sheaves and sheaves of fealty,
the smell of the forest from my feet.
Weigh me only by my purse.
A slim woman with a college degree,
a rented room without the black wings
of palmetto roaches fleeing the damp:
I saw the calm white towers and subscribed.
No ingrate, I saved a space for the lost.
They filled it once, twice, and kept on,
eating greasy flesh straight from the bone,
craning their heads to ask a prayer for them instead.

Downtown later in the easy dark,
three college boys in foam cowboy hats shout in poor Spanish.
They press into the night and the night presses into them.
They will go home when they have to.
Under the bridge lit in violet,
a folding chair is draped in a ***** blanket.
A grubby pair of tennis shoes lay beneath, no feet inside.
Iced tea seeps from a chewed cup.
I pass a bar lit like Christmas.
A mute and pretty face full of indoor light
makes a promise I see through a window.
I pay obscene rents to find out if it is true,
in this nation tied together with gallows-rope,
thumbing its codex of virtues.

I've been told
that I'm built like a fencepost
Kind of wiry
A few knobs here and there
A knot or two for character
I make a pretty good fence
Good at keeping things inside
Not letting things out
But now my shadow seems leaner
Not quite as tall in the morning sun
The soil around my feet eroding
Drying out isn't all it's cracked up to be
Staying straight ain't easy
The herd is getting restless
And the barbed wire on my back
is tearing me up inside.

r ~ 7/25/14

the Himalayas rise
there is snow on the peaks
I watch it from my bed
I gaze and gaze at it
in the morning
as a little village girl goes by
sniffling with cold
I too am cold
it is chilly here in Tosh in May
but a young Israeli boy
took off his shirt
and stood on the fencepost of the guesthouse dancing
down was the deep green valley
all of us watched in admiration
the next day I went down to the waterfall
which from here is a beautiful whisper in the air
there are donkeys and a path
and pretty houses on the other side of the valley
and everywhere there are people smoking hash and relaxing
in the cafes and the guesthouses
it is almost like a pilgrimage smokers keep coming
and sit around smoking talking
I pull down my woollen cap my arms and back
feel the chill despite a thick sweater
despite a blanket and a four inch thick quilt
I roll my joints and smoke them alone
sometimes smoke them with others
I look at the hills and the valleys and the wooden houses
I look at the white peaks glowing in the sun
and talk about CCR and stained glass art with Michael from Norfolk
who’s going down the valley to another village for a party tonight
with his young Spanish friend
I talk about Bombay with Puneet and Manya from Kanpur
who’ve come here on a Bullet
Hash Heaven Manya says reading my mind as the joint passes on
to the four engineering interns from Delhi
and all the time I sip on ginger lemon honey
for my sore throat until on the last day it disappears
unlike the young Israeli girl’s pink laptop in a pink cover
found by the part time caretaker in the garden on a pink chair
she left behind last night because it was too dark
come again the guesthouse boys say to me as I pay them
what a scene I think how cool as I begin to leave the village
down the dung-clotted stone steps nodding to the smokers coming in.

spring’s breath hums on your face
sits upon a fencepost, hawk-like and stoic

its infant rays nuzzle, organized and coded
its beauty, slightly bothersome
to the man who mistook god’s warmth as permanent

all planets in space operate between two foci
and ted hughes wrote “crow” as a bedtime story
for the lovers he abandoned  

what I’m trying to say is this:
spring will leave earth
like a two-faced lover
but never forget the monday you shared with her
as she breathed winter’s hangover
down your holy throat

for that is something memorable

Greed is a fencepost,
her thighs are laced with barbwire
towering so tall.

You shall not have me
for i am enormously
so much more than you.

Greed lies between thighs
tongue deep inside the lip folds;
this is mine, all mine.

Ashen fencepost in the sun
Barbed wire slowly rusting
Scrub grass straining for the sky
The milk cows ever mournful

Lawrence Hall, HSG
Mhall46184@aol.com

                   In the Foggy Dawn - a Hawk on a Fencepost

For him the hayfield is his restaurant
A baby mouse, perhaps, or a tasty rabbit
But I prefer a bacon-egg-cheese croissant -
For breakfast we are all creatures of habit!

Dear Trayvon,

We should be rioting in the streets
But it’s raining.
We should be banging our fists
****** against the locked doors
Of state buildings screaming justice!
But the tea kettle is on and
I had one too many drinks last night, so.

I feel guilty for the protection of patriarchy, for never
Wondering as I walk home in the evenings
Who will shoot me
For my skin,
For never waking up at night from
The nightmare picture of my son’s killer
Smiling as he walks free.

They pretended this was
About youth violence and
Text messages and
Self defense, which is like saying
Matthew Shepard was about a broken fencepost
And the Holocaust was about the right
of innocent Nazis to collect gold fillings
From shattered jewish teeth.
You were black.
You were black. And being black
In America makes you threatening
And being scared
of a teenager turns ****** into
Neighborly behavior.

And I will never have to worry
About someone protecting themselves
From the threat of my skin.
So I will never have to question
My complicity in a country
That would rather shoot down
Than stand for
Its young men.
So I will stand outside
Drinking tea and letting the rain cry for me
While I beat my fists against nothing
And by the morning you will
Already be forgotten
Just like all the other
Beautiful threatening boys
We never cared enough to know.

Bags are everywhere
snagged in the fingers of dead trees
signs of last nights weather--
strong winds,

high water.

And so it is with life.

The breeze picks up

and we soar (the
thing about veins and roots is)

until we snag.

Flap like a husk
gutted

on a fencepost.

when i saw the plastic
solar light on the fencepost, i knew i was flickering.

and if someone were to ask me how i feel
i would say that i am flickering.

I.

To steal away three oranges for love he was
instructed by long-ago’s cackling voices, but over time
words once sharply plucked and sealed in the wide mouth
of his boyish memory have grown up vague and bushy.

So, this night he picks to stalk the storybook rows
of stubby trees that squat smack in the middle of a maze
unknown but tender hands have pulled straight to hide
riddles in their patchwork of endlessly seamed sameness.

Aided by a sickle moon’s pointed glances, he hastily
harvests the wages of three waxy fruit and plops
his juicy hopes sweetly into a leather pouch, as loosed
the feather-leafed branches snap back skyward.

II.

Home on the next morning’s edge, first love he sights.
She has a narrow white face and blush-dabbed features
below a tall swab of swirled scarlet hair that wags
a bobbed tongue’s tale as she comes bouncing into view.

Striped dawn glows, and tickled he, perhaps too eagerly,
reaches into his bag with the lust of hurried hands.
An orange, yet under-ripe and unready, he blurts out to her
as a wholly careless, green-topped, and unpeeled gift.

She takes it and rolls it through her nest of slender tips.
The thumbs inspecting its sadly misshaped bits find
the bumps and crevices around a knobby stem are proof
of a worthless fruit. Dropping it, she walks on, nose up-turned.
III.

Twelve days left to his less-than-virtuous devices,
he fusses over the second orange. His nails dig in
to *****-cut peel its thick rind. He picks off odd
pieces of pith and smooths its newly gleaming surface.

These would-be idol hours spent preening could
pay off when another amour falls as an acid-yellow
figment. She floats down to him from the distant hilltops
with a floppy mop of golden curls and a broad pink brow.

Pristine fruit on palm extended, he waits his worth,
while the citrusy flesh, exposed to a mid-day sun,
shrivels brown and collapses into a pulpy mess. When
she passes, it draws a mere wave and topples easily.

IV.

As the shadows of a jagged-tooth fencepost lengthen
a sudden and thoughtless appetite grows in him.
He grabs the third orange and gobbles it all down
but a lone slick seed that sticks in his deflated cheek.

Bewitched from the seemed break in magic’s promise,
he makes this kernel an offering to devouring soils
and lays his hard head upon the single-seeded bed
where he’ll drowse rocked by soft-chirped serenades.

Then, a quake and a tree sprout. Spreading branches
lift him up among the strangely branded fruit
that an orange-tongued fairy nibbles as she tosses
green locks and smiles at him with her hazelly gaze.

I wish I could but am grateful I cannot
find the perfect word in my dirt-edged dictionary to describe this feeling
because all is not perfect.

I have lived and relived one hundred moves and counter-moves
not knowing black from white, simply wanting to need
to trap your affections beneath rock or steel as fits my schemes.
One hundred moves for every star in the sky of each wilting night,
and in the midst of a single breath –

a breath like one I swear we’ve shared
on couch or on fencepost in awkward happenstance

– this mind of mine manipulates
  all inadequate allegory, all incomplete comparison
  trying to condense into a single sentiment
  the breadth of that which my chest can rarely contain
and disposes of each in turn.

For words,
the countless words I know by sight and by sound,
would rather not comply.
If only they'd meet the demands of such a meager man,
this torment, this voiceless howl
calling me to blissless inaction
could find solace in this feeling.

They claim and they have said
over again for the misty-eared among us:
Love bears all things.
Yet the beast inside contests:
Bears love all things.
For this is not Love but an Eternal beast
a beast, a Bear, which thrives regardless
of my pain or pleasure
– striking out from the rotting memory of your chiseled touch.

He was sitting on a fencepost
A mouth harp in his hand
He started making music
Like a ghostly rubber band.
He called me a stranger
And, I asked him how he knew.
He raised his head and stared
And seemed to look me through.
He said:
There is nothing down this highway
But heartbreak and a tale
Nobody will friend you here
There’s nothing good for sale
We are here with no way out
So move right on away
You only have your freedom
If you don’t let yourself stay.

Some people think it’s heaven
‘Cause they never had a chance
They never had a friend before
A storybook romance.
They made some stupid choices
Now there’s a piper to pay.
They’re deaf to rhyme or reason
No matter what you say.
Some believe they never had
The character to change,
That they were born without a dream
The hopeless and strange.

But we know lonely backroads
That never reach the bay.
We live in fogs of memory
Here in Futile Quay.
Where once we were children;
Now we never smile.
Our trip down this highway
Is a never-ending mile.
So go on back to comfort
To security and plans.
Stay too long in Futile Quay
You’re out of fortune’s hands.

Rain on hot concrete
Droplets off my tree
Grey sky, mountains peaking
Along a fencepost, liquid leaking

Sound outside my room
Of my gutters being full
My house becomes, a waterfall
The ground below, a puddle sprawl

Clouds made it away
With sweltered summer sun
Let it rain for today, I need an overcast
Let the sky envelope, it's cloudy mast

You.
Where can I possibly begin?
My perception of you
Between an innocent first day
And a battle-scarred, war-torn last,
Has indescribably transformed.
Just as a chameleon does
Under the same circumstances of fear and doubt.

You.
You were there, ready for work.
Smelling of popcorn and lip-gloss.
Ignorant of what was ready to walk through that door
And ruin your life.

You.
You were there for months.
Friendly and shy all at once.
Laughing at my jokes
While guarding your heart with a strict severity.
And that profound underlying insecurity.
Awaiting the fall.

You.
You were there on that Autumn evening.
In the passenger seat of mom's Ford Explorer.
Your hair blowing in the frigid breeze.
It was there-
It was that evening.
Under the stars and lights of the Ferris wheel.
That my lips met yours.
I was awkward, I was scared;
I was elated.
You were mine.

You.
You donned that blue dress for Homecoming.
My hand could have wrapped around your waist
Again and again and again.
This was eternity.
This was love, as I spoke to you that night.
My hand grazing against yours,
My body pushed upon yours,
My heart on his knees for yours.

You.
You lit up 2011.
It was a year of illumination.
The year of rhythm, harmony, and bliss.
Every meal
Every date
Every touch of your skin.
Lit up my life like I never could have imagined.

You.
You were so smart.
Westfield, Roger Williams, Bridgewater.
The former was your favorite.
And you were gone.
But we still remained.
The idea of separation seemed impossible.

You.
You struggled so desperately.
To fit in, to grow up, to grow strong.
But you leaned on me like a fencepost.
Because I was there.
And I loved you so profoundly
That the thought of your unhappiness
Made my very being collapse.

You.
You continued to isolate yourself.
You continued to drown yourself.
Again and again.
And I was there.
And suddenly,
my friends weren't.
Nor was my family,
nor were my hobbies,
nor was my identity.
And suddenly,
I was an empty container.
Serving to please you.
Every call.
Every game.
Every night spent alone.
Every tear.
Every wish for my life back.
For you.

You.
You demanded my presence.
Or, by your standards,
I did not regard you as anything more than a body.
By your standards,
I did not love you.
By your standards,
I did not care.

You.
You were there for my first day on campus.
Ready to criticize.
Ready to consume me.
Ready to tell me why I was not what you wanted anymore.
But
"I was in there"
God knows that I hoped I was.

You.
You dragged me through this year.
Time I could have spent connecting.
And laughing.
And making memories of the sun and moon.
But this was it.

You.
You begged me not to leave.
Because what would you be?
Without me attached to your sleeve?

You.
You always had a reason.
Why it always "made sense"
And so what did logic dictate?
My wings refused to lift me.
And I stayed.
Like a hopeless fool,
I stayed.
And we were on for year four.

You.
You took a room for two
And made it your own.
You took a passion,
a hobby,
a life,
And made it your own.
You ensured the final draining of my soul.

You.
You knew I was getting worse.
You knew I was no longer there.
You knew nothing lied behind the blank stare.
Nothing could prepare you
For a trainwreck of a partner.

You.
You turned my emotions into a background noise.
When I cried, the couch became my best friend.
When I could not feel, you made me do.
When I could not do, you made me do.
When I could not go on, you made me do.
Because you had felt so unfulfilled
For so ******* long
Because of the corpse lying next to you at night.

You.
You didn't know.
Just as ignorant as I was.
This was love.
This wasn't love.
This was what it was supposed to be.
So we thought.
And so one day,

I.
I knew.
I left.
Teary eyed, achy, and broken.
The last ounce of life drained out of me,
Feeling like an aging man.
Feeling like the **** under my shoe.
Feeling
Such an amazing relief.

I.
I now can say you are gone.
And I have moved on.
And my life is forever changed.
No matter how many souls I encounter,
No matter how many ghosts may haunt me,
No matter how much love I may receive,
You will be there.
Because I can never know if I was right.
Because I can never know why
I made the choices I did.
And I'm so sorry, my dear.
I'm so terribly sorry
That I could not separate
The love I wished to give
From the love I couldn't possibly feel.

The In-Between
Miles of dust and sun
40 needful years of turning on a bitter lathe
Yet only my children will know why
and will their children's children remember?
will any legacy be left written upon hills of sand?
will there be no wind, no moon, no fear?

No

Well…

Maybe

In a way I am begotten of those stiff-necked nomads
In a way, my feet still burn and suffer the lessons learned

But I have my own desert stretching my toes
But I have seen a promised land filled with giants
and I have sided with the ten
and I have labeled the two - nutbrained

But slow your fear shea… slow your darting eyes and consider…

I live
I don't have to but I live
I live now
At least for now… but
For what?
Must I live for something?
I might live for nothing important
but that is not the same as nothing
and important is a thing to consider
while this wind carries pain into your face

But I do not lie down
to let dunes shift over me
For this fact if none other
I perceive a reason
A something
More even - a Presence
Concepts in the human mind are like these flowing hills - changing
I have not pushed
this far
for the sake of a concept
I know I have not because - becuase - it is not even in my power to do so
you are looking at a turtle on a fencepost - do the math

So return behind the How
Let the weight of the What
and the wonder of the Where
Conclude
with the obvious Why
There is only one
and it is a Who

So tell me while my ears are open
Play Solomon for my blistered and bewildered heart
must I chase wind
or worse… turn heel and flee the wind
all the way back to Egypt
Can these ashes in my mouth be
swallowed or spit
while I yet live - yet journey

When you feel your heart beat through your chest,
I can't possibly mean anything good.

Either you've consumed far too much
(Food, Alcohol, Opiates, Helium, Ecstasy)
Or you've dabbled too far in love.

I, myself, cannot feel the difference
I am balancing on the fencepost.
My mind wishes that I could be done
But my body aches for you the most.

There is a part of me that wishes
I never even met you at all
I cannot face reality, it melts
My heart is too weak for the withdrawal

Why do you continue to torment me?
Is there some mental trick you wish to play?
I try to occupy myself with other things
But I think about you every day.

I've seen the hard times come by
And I think I know enough

I'm ready to be done with you


I've fallen out of love.

he told me it's kind of like you copy people


I saw a certain amount of truth in that,
but it was more like adding a layer of paint
onto a canvas i've already been working on--

ever since I can remember I have treated people
like arts and crafts, like books, like in depth studies
I've loved watching documentaries on the salinity of
ocean water
Shakespeare's secret life and cotton blankets
watched my father put together bikes
disassemble sinks and make things work
been at a loss for words but filled
to the brim with definitions i'll
never use,
always been
fascinated by the unknown
and the known, often found
with acrylic smeared on
my thighs like a palette
deep in thought with
no poker face, searching
for different ways to describe
the way I have or have not seen
people-- dodgem, reticent, abseil,
cloisonne.

so,
yes,
I see the truth in that
in wanting to understand so badly
that it becomes a part of me,
but how can you tell them that?
how can you tell him that?
how can you say, 'this is me'
a conglomerate of many but
still my own?

i cannot put a halter on curiosity
putting songs on repeat to harmonize
to, wanting to know everything about
the things people love because
there is so much to appreciate,
to follow, to grasp and I
want to get in and get
*****, I want to
twist between the gears
touch everything
every fencepost
every brick, every
old paperback

so,
maybe.

maybe that is true.

He was sitting on a fencepost
A mouth harp in his hand
He started making music
Like a ghostly rubber band.
He called me a stranger
And, I asked him how he knew.
He raised his head and stared
And seemed to look me through.
He said:
There is nothing down this highway
But heartbreak and a tale
Nobody will friend you here
There’s nothing good for sale
We are here with no way out
So move right on away
You only have your freedom
If you don’t let yourself stay.

Some people think it’s heaven
‘Cause they never had a chance
They never had a friend before
A storybook romance.
They made some stupid choices
Now there’s a piper to pay.
They’re deaf to rhyme or reason
No matter what you say.
Some believe they never had
The character to change,
That they were born without a dream
The hopeless and strange.

But we know lonely backroads
That never reach the bay.
We live in fogs of memory
Here in Futile Quay.
Where once we were children;
Now we never smile.
Our trip down this highway
Is a never-ending mile.
So go on back to comfort
To security and plans.
Stay too long in Futile Quay
You’re out of fortune’s hands.

Brent Kincaid
10/22/2010

He was sitting on a fencepost
A mouth harp in his hand
He started making music
Like a ghostly rubber band.
He called me a stranger
And, I asked him how he knew.
He raised his head and stared
And seemed to look me through.

He said:
There is nothing down this highway
But heartbreak and a tale
Nobody will friend you here
There’s nothing good for sale
We are here with no way out
So move right on away
You only have your freedom
If you don't let yourself stay.

Some people think it’s heaven
‘Cause they never had a chance
They never had a friend before
A storybook romance.
They made some stupid choices
Now there’s a piper to pay.
They’re deaf to rhyme or reason
No matter what you say.
Some believe they never had
The character to change,
That they were born without a dream
The hopeless and strange.

But we know lonely backroads
That never reach the bay.
We live in fogs of memory
Here in Futile Quay.
Where once we were children;
Now we never smile.
Our trip down this highway
Is a never-ending mile.
So go on back to comfort
To security and plans.
Stay too long in Futile Quay
You’re out of fortune’s hands.

and just how far have you gone for the sake of your "camaraderie," my friend?

their half-glow hearts and prejudiced minds could have swallowed you whole,

or abandoned you, wit be-******, and genius be-******, you
might have died a pauper—

I hear they’d **** a man much more guarded than you, they might string him up,

tie his broken body to a fencepost, leave him ******,

satisfy a tyranny under the watchful eye of a loving God,

trade a boy in Laramie for a jet-black brutal odium,

**** a kid and wonder what his mother did to steer him wrong—

but still you wrote of calamus and of holding hands and handsome lovers,

still you gave us songs to sing back to our lovers, gentle songs,

despite the shame and censorship they cursed you with, despite

the threat that everything could be undone, despite the scripture,

well I must say, dear Good Gray Poet, before I fold my hand,

thank you, Walt, for giving us what you never had.

Family values,
Sold on the black market
Five dollars for a segue from the chorus
Of a baby's happy first words
To the tears caused by daddy's final vice

Compromise,
The loft where secrets sleep
Parrying words with shields of skin
Tethering dreams to a fencepost in the lawn
To keep them from the clouds in the distant sky

Life escapes,
Like the air from a balloon
It erodes like a weathered mountain
All the lights are on in a three-story house
But everyone's home and drowning

In the dark.

Calibration is important when fighting them
It is said they have higher caliper weapons

Knowing your enemy, how he thinks, how he moves--
That is essential.

It is not so hopeless, it is not a joke
Not to that extent and you know it in your heart,
What this could be.

Rebuke the devil.
Rebuke the devil.
Rebuke Satan.

There are tall demons, tall demons that will tell you they are made of stone, steel
DNA, guns, money
Paucity, bad timing, fat
But they are not made of those things--
They are made of smoke
And you can walk right through them like pillars of smoke.

There is no hope for you if you walk out into the rain without at least a sunjacket on.

Pairs of dark red or black ******* are more likely to contain blood stains

Don't forget to slurp the noodle

A Saturday afternoon in Austin, in mid-March.
A dinner scheduled, a girl with colored hair
says she has enjoyed our conversation, and will see me soon.
A stack of books piled up to my knee,
and three hours to sit in the sun, if it lasts.

There is something terrible in the sky, but it keeps breaking.
Over the chimneys a bank of cloud piles up; one flies overhead and I'm forced to reread a page gone grey.
A pinkness is rising in my arms, breast, ears,
and my sweat drips onto split pages.
I am wet like the drowned and my eyes sting.
A message from my sister informs me of another overdose.
A hand reaches everywhere to pass over eyes and mouths.
A glowing wound opens in heaven.

A mirror out of doors draws a gyre of oak seeds no one watches,
in the clear pool now black as a cypress swamp.

Bitter water freezes the muscles and I am far from shore.
The water reflects a taut rope.
The water reflects a jail in the shallowest bend
that will one day be remade to stanch the water of poison.
Feet hang in the breeze singing mercy
at the site of the last public hanging in the state.
Today, the very area dilapidates as if scorched
by the whiskey he drank that morning to still himself.
A bandit, maybe, but loved by the poor, and now
lonely, at this end of authority: a world he has never lived in
foisting itself on the world he has -
only now, to steal his drunken life, then gone again.

Years later, a plinth is laid
in the shadow of his piney feet,
here where the water sickens with roots.
Where the canoe overturned. Where the oar was broken.
Where the snake lives, and teethes on bark,
waiting for another uncle. Where schoolchildren take the afternoon
to trim the kudzu growing between the bodies of slaves.
Where appetite is met with flood and fat
and a clinic for the heart,
the best in the region.

Where the tobacco waves near drying barns rusted like horseshoes.
Where the boats took tar down to port, and money back
that no one ever saw.

  Tar binds the heel but isn't courage.
  Tar seals the hull -
  sticks the planks -
  made the roads.
  Tar is a dark brown or black viscous liquid of hydrocarbons and free carbon, obtained from a wide variety of organic materials through destructive distillation.
  Tar in the lungs will one day go as hard as a five-cent candy.

Liberty Food Mart
Cheapest Prices on Cigarettes
Marlboro $22.50/carton

The white-bibbed slaughterhouse Hmong hunch down the steps
of an old school bus with no air conditioner. They pick clean the
vegetables, flee with woven bags bulging.
What were they promised?
Air conditioning.
And what did they receive?
Chickenshit on the wind; a dead river they can't understand
with a name it gained from killing.

Truth:
A man was flung onto a fencepost and died in a front yard down the street.
A woman was set upon by an owl and cracked her head on the driveway.
I once saw an Indian murdered for stealing a twelve-foot ladder.
The red line indicating heart disease grows higher and higher.
The red line indicating cardiovascular mortality grows higher and higher.
The red line indicating motor vehicle deaths grows higher and higher.
*I burn with the desire to leave.

The stories make us full baskets of dark. No death troubles me.
Not the bored blood excited by opiates;
not the nighttime arson of the law;
not the smell of drywall rotting or the door of the robbed safe falling off its hinges;
not the chassis of teenaged cars gone high over the bump,
over the bend, plunging wide-eyed in the river's icy arc.

If you would like to understand,
look in the woods to see by lamplight
two girls filling each other's mouths with smoke.
Hear the shout of boys loosening a tire,
stuck in the gut of a dog.  
Turn on the radio between towns of two thousand
and hear the tiny voice of an AM preacher, sharing the airwaves of country dark with some chords plucked from a guitar.
Drink this water, bitter as it is: and if they tell you that trees cannot feel pain, you will have learned not believe them.
I would be a mausoleum for these thousands
if I only had the room.

Here in the city, a mute and pretty face makes a promise I see through a window. I pay obscene rents to find out if it is true, in this nation tied together with gallows-rope, with its codex of virtues.

They laugh when i wear a collar,
Ask if I'm a dog.
But they couldn't be more right,
Im feral,
I bite.
I foam at the mouth,
drool spills from crying so hard;
i can't tell whether my lungs are getting any air, in, or out.
And I whine whenever you're not around.

I love like a dog
Too loyal to be mad
Every time you put me down.
Leave blisters on my neck from pulling me towards the ground,
Your fingers gripping my collar to lead me on
And pull me around.
Id let you kick me outside if it meant i got to sleep in your bed again
Someday
Somenight

Anyone else gets too close and i bite
Only to be proven right
Every cold, ******* lonely night
No reply while you're out on a late night drive
Different ***** with her head out the window
While i'm chained to the fencepost,
Lucky if i even see you tonight

The difference between you and i
Is you talk when it's convenient
Whereas i would walk out a conversation
Just to try and start a new one with you


But they're right
Im a dog,
Who doesn't know the right time to growl and bite.