So, Who Wants to Walk Slack?

Because we have no home in language
We keep memories there
As if the past were true
And grinning in a grainy b/w
Teenagers posing johnwayned
Twisted into facts
Jungle-wise who knows
What grows there deep
All night knotted in your heart
Form mangles with content
Hear clouds scrape dark
Clutch the claymore clacker like
Life depends on blasting 1000 pellets
Across the muddy path below
Meaning in its meat
As if out there
Our ass sad little war
Had not ended
Is never ever over and
Because it’s history we hold on
And keep sending our children.

 

Every Meal is a Happy Meal

Let us see the evening as raw meat
Finest Grade A Prime
Spitted ready for the burning

Charred and bloody rare
Leaking on the platter white
As we find our way into this scene

A table offered up with places
And take our portions of the gore
With salt and wines and candle flicker

Let us eat these products
Over faces of the hungry
From the heart range of this continent

The cowboy bounty of hard work
Slice and savor the marbled meats
And rub our full bellies round

And sense ourselves deserving
These cuts and servings
As if it were duty to an economy

That can no longer afford our appetites

 

Floating Jack’s Fork of the Current River,

Shannon County, Missouri, August 2010

I try to pretend but the wind

gets in my way, night enters and
shadows crawl along the gravel shoals

into the tree line across the water.
At any other campfire they would be
memories called up and spat
into the flames, sizzle for a second
and rise as smoke unto the stars.
But in this dark they crawl

over old sandbags to my heart—
great slobbering ghosts from Viet Nam,
and set their altars

dig out dog tags, cartridges,
belt buckle, buttons
canteen and rations—

ashes, ashes, old bones of heat.

Houston/2018

To read more from D.F. Brown buy Ghost of a Person: Passing in Front of the Flag at Bloomsday Literary.