I’m sitting on a cold stool in Delta Hall of King County Juvenile Detention and the young man next to me is writing a poem. This kid is maybe sixteen, probably younger, the desperate affect of a nascent mustache and wiry limbs. I’ve seen him try to figure out how to build the right expression on his face for me, for the guards, for his peers, depending on whom he senses is looking at him. He’s writing a poem about
The same blood in which road rage fires daily Flows slowly when on my knees doing tonglen The same fingers that fire forty caliber hollow points Trace my son’s tiny face, rake his hair The same wind that whistles thanatos in my helmet Spins leaves around the stroller that I push The same mind that conjures sweet revenge Drafts forgiveness within the same hour The same spirit that settles between my sleeping wife and son
An Elegy These days I’m prone to speculate That the three stone walls The crumbling hearth and chimney Is what convoked the wilding minds Of my ragged crew at age 16 Those days, I was more likely to simply be prone Laying in the damp grass with a spliff And a twig Renovating the world of bugs Flushing away the rigid blank of high school What’s true depends, of course, on filters: The giddy kaleidoscope of
My son was out under the broad North Cascade skies yesterday afternoon. I don’t know what exactly he was doing because I wasn’t there; he was with his grandmother. Probably he was dunking his rubber rooster in his pirate ship water table or else maybe pitching tiny clods of dirt from the planter off the porch. He could have been pestering the dog with the open handed slaps that he thinks of as petting. Whatever he
“We are trying to execute him because he was punished.” (?) – Widow of slain police officer, Mark Macphail Tonight the state of Georgia will execute Troy Anthony Davis unless a miraculous order comes down from Alabama Governor Nathan Deal. Another black man whose guilt is as in doubt as global warming down there in Dixie: 7 out of 9 “witnesses” recanting and telling stories of police threats, etc., etc. It seems to me that if they