I watched the water rise. Creeping down the muddy street. As if a divine force was attempting a stealthy act of insurrection. I didn't have the heart to fight it. Had I only known.

I watched Hell's Half Acre silently succumb to the whimsical (however so pleasantly devastating) path of Gaea. Through this empowering incident I felt redemption like I never had before.

I jumped down from the platform of the livestock pen to personally welcome the satisfying force of nature's purification. The water lashed out and grabbed my leg. At that moment my jubilate spirit spoiled to uncontaminated terror. It was not a redemptive Spirit winding its way through the rail tracks but the serpent Lucifer. Had I only known.

And so in the West Bottoms Tavern I found myself under the ***** shoe of The Machine. A wayward phantom rising from our precarious Kansas River. It drifts through the sweet Midwest like the coal black locomotive smoke that paints a suffocating thick haze above the Stockyards.

A welcome slate of provision. A shelter covering us from the racial tension and poverty smothering the outside world. To those in the Bottoms with unruly desires, a saviour. To those at City Hall with loose morals, the messiah.

And it was at 1908, I nervously pulled the covers over my vulnerable body and sealed Satan's foul kiss with a diabolical red scrawl. We skipped hand in hand through the freshly paved streets of our "wide open" town. I always tried my best to look the other way but I knew full well that I travelled with a gang of thieves.

Nonetheless, everyone votes in our town. A brutal party whip keeps the Jackson County Democrats in line and "Charlie the ***" prevents any Rabbits from multiplying.

But I've been working from within the belly of a "whale" for years and I fear we've now run out of ocean. Our arranged marriage has robbed my capacity for faithful navigation. I'm seeking a radical divorce from The Beast, the cost has become inconsequential to me.

So I found genuine redemption. Finally. I closed the driver side door to my sedan and walked out to the edge of the bridge. The water below seemed whimsical (and so pleasantly devastating) in nature, much the same as it had 36 years ago. I pinned this note to the window, and with a Ready-Mixed Concrete block tied around my waist I watched the water rise.

To Certain Poets About to Die

Take your fill of intimate remorse, perfumed sorrow,
Over the dead child of a millionaire,
And the pity of Death refusing any check on the bank
Which the millionaire might order his secretary to
     scratch off
And get cashed.

     Very well,
You for your grief and I for mine.
Let me have a sorrow my own if I want to.

I shall cry over the dead child of a stockyards hunky.
His job is sweeping blood off the floor.
He gets a dollar seventy cents a day when he works
And it's many tubs of blood he shoves out with a broom
     day by day.

Now his three year old daughter
Is in a white coffin that cost him a week's wages.
Every Saturday night he will pay the undertaker fifty
     cents till the debt is wiped out.

The hunky and his wife and the kids
Cry over the pinched face almost at peace in the white box.

They remember it was scrawny and ran up high doctor bills.
They are glad it is gone for the rest of the family now
     will have more to eat and wear.

Yet before the majesty of Death they cry around the coffin
And wipe their eyes with red bandanas and sob when
     the priest says, "God have mercy on us all."

I have a right to feel my throat choke about this.
You take your grief and I mine--see?
To-morrow there is no funeral and the hunky goes back
     to his job sweeping blood off the floor at a dollar
     seventy cents a day.
All he does all day long is keep on shoving hog blood
     ahead of him with a broom.

The insidious wrath of age has pilfered her beauty ..
Rusted chains hang in quietude , wrenched in dubious functionality ....
Superfluous stockyards , fencing long in need of repairs ..
Barns that once bustled with the drudgery of agriculture can only whisper ..
Wind chimes trill in the cold afternoon , the crack of the hammer to the anvil gone ..
Tractor implements lie frozen , a lone Crow stands guard over barren orchards* ..

they packed the town into a big box
and shipped it to southeast ohio
they packed bryan adams into a box
and shipped it to southeast asia
they packed the baby into a box
and shipped it to madonna

drawn up with a silver pen
the EPZs jurisdiction
the cease fires declaration
and the stockyards reopen for business

the hundred thousand leaves shrouding
the white house roar
like a crowd, like a nation
a few man's hands
shake that sound
like snake's tails rattling
into a megaphone

the heavy metal band pleads self-defense.
they just play music. that's all they do
they're not protesting
except in a vague way
against everything,
they're not sure what
perhaps the chaotic volume
of their early adolescence

a child bent around a pen
is told to count the lima beans again
he counted too fast
a snarling dragon pulls up
and he rides, concluding
in a sorcerer's castle constructed
of speedy fretwork and overbearing tablature

the card game made us
wizards, frankly, and we enjoyed it
more than being what we were
I throw the dice and the king's head
tumbles with them into a basket

a burmese girl sews the silhouette
of a man performing
a feat not meant for man
into the side of a shoe that will
wing you to heaven if
heaven is as high
as a slam dunk. boys
in a park joust styrofoam swords
a hand is folded
behind the back to signify its heroic
loss in battle. it is regrown momentarily
to dunk a chicken mcnugget.
in another park across town
boys no longer ****
each other for their shoes.
jay z is in a booth with warren buffett
and jerry seinfeld at daniel

they are saving the galaxy

the only one we have to save
which nobody lives in anymore
the forest is off in endor
the snow belongs to hoth

a boy fights a war
in an afghan marketplace
through his television set


in hd and widescreen
it's practically photorealisitic
the guns sound authentic
in 5.1 digital surround

another boy fights the exact same war
he wishes it did not look so real

the internet, our new planet

i shut the computer down
404: I am a file no longer to be found

We are the wild ones, so curious and superb. Hyper-expectations, mainly magic and its' feral treasures, we all welcome aboard. We are the technicians of the sky, messengers of the infinite moons. Inside the scythes and harpsichords, explosive reiterations of gravity and inner body magnetic yearnings.

We are stacked and galavanting in stockyards, whips at our sides, leather roughening its unstitched oiled calf hides up the hands onto these ethereal imaginings of utopian unicorn, walrus, and seahorse.

We represent the catalog of diversity. You are not as hidden as you think and you must not be. We of the wise wrestling candles off of our staffs, we count the mountain rich mountainside. Red, clay-capped, snow and hidden saplings adjusted against the rows of the peaks and plateaus.

We are named for our perversions of nature, our tolerances towards myriad injustices spanning our existence's time-sensitive minutia. We may be the kings and queens of Lollibellum, our flights have landed, our hands filled with duct-taped newspaper wrapped packaging and knock-off designer bags, a cardboard box with a few books that survived the burn.

Where the hills don't roll
They sink low
And fall into the ground
The sky swallowing what is left

We can be backwards

The hub is the heart
The roads are the veins
Highway arteries
And the river is polluted

Fort Worth stockyards
Cattle drives and mavericks
Rangers in the field
And stars on ice

A place out west where the cowboys lose

A place I saw my blood first hit the ground
My childhood home

I havent been there in such a long time
Its no longer real to me

Bovine-like, we shall meet our deaths
(Such is the scythe the reaper wields)
No matter that the final breaths
Come in stockyards or placid fields.
A slight rustle, perhaps, we’ll feel
At the loss of our distant kin;
Another gear, another wheel.
Oh well—that’s life—come on, tuck in.

What, then, shall be the epitaph?
No bromide written in some stone,
One would hope, for this life once shone
In a mother’s eyes, father’s laugh
Which still flower in memories
And vexes all our reveries.

Lawrence Hall
Mhall46184@aol.com
https://hellopoetry.com/lawrence-hall/
poeticdrivel.blogspot.com

                DaddyPaw’s Letters from the CCC Camp

           For George (“DaddyPaw”) Hargrove, Hebo Ogden Hall,
And all Who Served in the Civilian Conservation Corps, 1933 - 1942

He found his DaddyPaw’s young adulthood
In a box of letters from New Mexico
About fighting forest fires and building fence
To the stockyards at Magdalena

“The peas must be coming in by now,” he writes
“Are yall getting enough to eat? How’s my dog?
I’ve got swell friends but I sure wish I was home.
And did yall get the five dollars I sent?”

We stand in reverence of a generation
Who almost never had enough to eat

The black stallion runs onto the tracks
headlong into the train’s cycloptic  light
attempting to break its horsepower.

He refuses to yield to gravity
touching his feet and grounding him
into mammal again:  

sweat, hair, lungfuls of air,
refuses to slip his nose
through another hard halter.

His head and hind legs draw up.
He kicks the landscape
and the landscape flies away

in the blur of speed and motion,
the fight with the steel air
steering towards him.

The trees turn black
and all green goes away.
The ground is cut to wrinkles.

The stallion drops his long neck
and fumbles with his thick tongue.
He stumbles into shadow.

Once, a long time ago,
he was named Never.
Today, he tosses off that.

The clouds from the train’s smokestack
pummel the nimbus of the dark sky
and its wheels stampede flesh and bone.

Its cars are loaded with cattle
headed for the stockyards
far away in the west.