CHAR

Super soaker days
Night smoke haze
a bramblewood chiminea
is the only indication of
settlers that have been before
a tribunal of their own making
"I thought they were half-human
and these people next door I knew not
I found their dog dead
in the drive,
a
RAID filled ball
with a smiling tear,
the smelly stuff porn
out
on the aggregate."
"Under these circumstances we
grant you amnesty and appropriate
your time well spent out back
with the trees blowing in the breeze
and the now-dead dog barking
at the squirrel den in the trunk of the
Tulip Poplar
and the dark cream of a windstripped
puddle in the base of a bowl
feathered and leaves falling
all about the
F
  A
     L
        L
season air that irrigates your scalp
the tundra of your mind
pores thru
the drive-thru
dramatic mean bug,

I wonder if you piled all of the cigarette butts
in the world into one
pile how many people would be displaced

If you never take anything away from 100 books
I hope you hide this in your bubble goose:
find a friend
cultivate gratitude
handle the hard
jog your jogger back
to the foyer
where the blanket read TONY
in script like a dying woman wrote it while
she was dying
with peach preserves long dried
in a shape not unlike
two dachsunds being biblical
DON'T TALK TO ME LIKE THAT, TONY
GOD IS ON MY SIDE AND
I DON'T HAVE TO JUSTIFY MYSELF (I DO)
I DON'T HAVE TO HAVE JUSTICE
I GUESS YOU JUST HAD TO DASEIN (BEING THERE)
you'll remember the smells
of Pulaski
when it "wasn't you back there"

it will be a time or two or three more longer
to come out of this, Ruby Fall