Man of God (for Walker Railey)
The winter of your sixty-first year finds you
well-fed, mustachioed and enjoying
your new life, a wonderful existence
or what is sold as such in this day and age,
including a buxom, blonde new wife,
and the by-products of living well:
rooms full of Ikea furniture, the turkey-bacon
which the wife brings home from Whole Foods,
the two cars: one of them fast and sporty,
the other gas-guzzling.
Your tail’s tacked to the bloated corpse of pre-fab opulence.
Several states away in what the natives deem God's Country,
a reminder of days when you were piety's picture in a hate-filled city,
lies etiolated, stiff as the pines enveloping the place.
Such a stubborn, static presence can’t bring your attention to what was,
having not uttered anything resembling a word for quite some time,
but inside moans and flailing, bestial shrieks heard through the walls,
and down halls full of the sick and dying,
sounds that punctuate the institutional green,
maybe it she remembers the way you were
and the two children you left with a friend
“for a few days,”
and what your hands did
that April night,
wringing out
most of her life
in the garage
of a house
neither of you
will ever return to.
1 comment:
A solemn piece of prose about a solemn subject. Written in blood as it should be and a reminder that two legged beasts do indeed still walk this earth with justice gone undone.
Gario
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