Monday, July 15, 2013
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
Monday, July 1, 2013