—He steals, but he gets stuff done
They did not bury his heart separately.
They never found his left foot, only bone.
The funeral director reattached his left arm.
No lawsuit was filed, no criminal charges.
This is the darkening between walls.
This is the color of shade within shadow.
If you look at the leaves correctly,
you can see the silver lining shimmering
when the wind blows, the sun at its apex.
But you cannot gather the man’s cart,
carry it home to his family, tell them
how it was when he died, how it was who killed him.
Do the police shoot first because they are afraid of poverty?
Do they shoot first because of the marks on skin?
Do they shoot first because they know rich from poor?
They buried all of him minus his left foot.
The driver who recklessly sped into him
has another new car, a Bugatti Chiron perhaps,
Maybe a Veneno. There he is with his lady friends
drinking, driving too fast, too careless,
unafraid of consequence. The police will never shoot him.
| Copyright © 2019 by Michael H. Brownstein Michael H. Brownstein’s latest volume of poetry, A Slipknot Into Somewhere Else, was published by Cholla Needles Press in 2018. |
Michael, you go to a tragic place in this poem, a place too often visited by the sinning and the sinned against. I read the poem as a strong call for us to be just...and to be more careful in our conduct.
ReplyDeleteWow. The darkness between walls, indeed. How evocative, how true.
ReplyDelete