I am asleep in a refection, an oil-imbued rainwater puddle concentrically shining off-color rainbows as dust falls around me from machines passing overhead.
Exaggerated in my concrete cocoon, I remain aloof and collect the refuse and make it bright.
It is my job.
I am absent of stolen mentality and identity of the southern land, forlorn to accept the rough, stone hewed path laid before my feet, every stuttering step chasing small pox and crawling closer still to the dank quicksand of the peninsular swamps.
Destiny and a white man have brought me here, a man who sits in my house and eats my bread and impregnates my woman.
The iron tracks I laid ring with a golden love of foreign wealth, while connective biology falls against my back as I sleep to share oats and hard tack on the dirt floor of my canvas tent.
My Gaelic blood mingles with my Cantonese heritage and my native son craving communication steals my African cowboy instinct.
Where quilts are gathered and stitched in flat conversation, where mothers instruct daughters to pin-precision courting, where boxes are completed to offer virginity to the next available bachelor of thirty-five.
My Catskill roughness - carving swathes by thoughtless horsemen barreling down through spectral passes… darkness and ignorance in a time of enlightenment trips me up.
A canal, filled with songs of labor and prosperity and fifteen men… mules braying under loads of cotton and corn and wheat as they float from a puddle between the White North and me.
Where Portuguese boatmen ply trade with pepperoni and gentile fashion in a language all my own I rest on my laurels and expel virtue for the working class man.
I pick grapes and I am not allowed to drink.
Harmony, I fall between the cracks of middle nothingness, essential but overlooked upon route Sixty-Six, gobbling gorgeous burgers and smiling at giant plastic dinosaurs with graffiti on their bellies.
I am your poor and huddled masses being kicked in the crotch.
Inside the coalmine, blackened by scarring fuel for a consumption that digresses from natural faiths, dead within seven years from a cough no cherry flavored sweetness can exhume or expectorate.
At carnivals I am ridden, circular and complete as a nomad of critical acclaim, I am a sideshow barker, excused from civilization to sell tickets one for a dime, three for a quarter.
At Pocono’s resorts I am old death half-alive, gray in my roots and watching the next generation hate that they are not in Orlando sipping juice from a great mouse’s tit.
Alone, I am a composition of everything that I am,
in the smallest detail no microscope can extract.
A pane of glass swimming universe constrained,
under the eye of those who wish to examine and catalogue me.
I am an American specimen. |
Submission Name: Broad Arms and a Strong Back
