To The Listener
you can hear wood breaking you’ve gotten close in the riverbed with the crowd stacked in and the pallets burning with a slice of rebar someone flogs a beat onto a paint can with a voice to hack a lawnmower in half a man in a wheelchair sings with diminished fifths elbowed into his oak accordion his words you must bend down to hear you’ve gotten close enough to smell his sawdust his cigar a smoldering wand and something of you is breaking when he chants above the croaking accordion something of your town you must find for your people in the sound of bones and wood a sliver of joy as the fifths of vodka diminish as the crowd inches toward the fire at the wheelchair you huck your spit-cup in the tobacco sucker-punch in the fist in the bottle in the gravel and the teeth in the final kick against the Ford’s fender in the unhinged jaw and in the sampling of a silent man’s pulse when you step over the body you hear music when you wipe the blood from your boot
