after Roger Reeves
Until then, allow us our sugar and our salt. Herbal teas with antioxidants
and imported coffee beans. Soft butter and assortments of fresh cheeses.
We will believe our boldest lies. The world will know how very large we are
below the waist, and our many, many, many guns how near, because they
keep us warm while we fire them in cold blood; allow us the bullets till
that promised day. Allow us to raise our children in wholesome villages:
the little girls taught to keep their legs closed until forced wide and open,
the little boys built in image of wrecking balls as homage to what swings
below the belt, what we praised allegiance to earlier. Yes, let us have our
families. Let us have the colored ones play hunted ducks to our buckshot,
none of them swans worth saving. Failing schools will all be closed down,
and jails had more and more often for teaching the hard lessons. God will be
praised on Sunday and in all campaign speeches. Policemen will pull old
Southern tricks out of their holsters. The word faggot will live in the closets
of our mouths. Yes, give us our mouths till then: for spouting slurs and saliva.
Give us syringes. Baking soda. The suburbs and shopping malls full of angst-
filled teens. Give us bombs with remote controls. Movie villains that speak
Arabic through yellowed teeth. Maybe a spicy Latina to clean the ghosts of
our weekend appetites off the floor. We will naturally root for the Cowboys
over the Redskins. We will eat gluten-free but glutton. We will drink and then
drive drunk down the throat of darkness. Let us. Let us remember to take our
male enhancement pills. Let us have the pornography of our wildest dreams.
Let us fall in love and through the bottom, on top of a bed of bones we say
isn’t there – where all the tribes sleep still, still wrapped in tainted blankets.
Photo by Ed Schipul
