Let loose again—
it goes slithering and gnaws at your sleep:
this mess—this unbagged bust of tinged tumors,
burst on tinny tongues;
scribbles of law and scripture—
of selective founding myths—
all chasing the dead.
Fraught language—
creaking down a length of board—
bleachery slung clings to the spume
dialogue rots in the teeth.
“The time has come,” cries the preacher,
“for the land to be remade . . . ”
hallucinated souls skyrocket
through unpregnant light—
hit the streets, stump through neighborhoods,
carnivalesque flags flying—
drunk on their freedom: open carry & carrying on,
for no one shall tell them anything they don’t want to know . . .
And the king—
out-there & out-loud,
tossing appeals to slake the thirst
dismembering admission
baptizing grief
into the belly of the other.
America, the rumbling frightened child, leaves another corpse to crawl over,
America, with thoughts and prayers, goes and sits around the corner
deliberating with despair
unable to decide what it should do—
silence of mind snakes back in—
habitual prejudice, the limit of thought:
an unwillingness
unwillingly going,
watching—
as butterflies flare
caught in their cadences
undone
in a convulsed choreography.