Listen to poem:
A Frenchmens Hell Nothing More
A Frenchmen’s Hell Nothing More
David J Walker
No father
Please I pled
It was only a dream
Nothing more
About mesquit trees
Turning themselves into mustang ponies
Nothing more
Running wild and free on a drunkards horizon
A prairie’s floor
The fences strengthened
The three gates tightened
hanging
post to post to post
Nothing more
Now
About the horse’s corral
a few paces from the barn
You could see
It was only me
Painting curses in Spanish because I knew
The obscene verses Could be far worse
Because the Mustangs could read them
And laugh at my bad Spanish grammar
Still
They got the picture
Nothing more
to the story except
It’s why I stayed awake past midnight
And snapped the bullwhip ever so often
Cracking a warning into a southwest wind
Blowing warm its warning in naked numbness
Nothing more
Except, father
The mustangs might win the fight and send
The souls of our stallions into a Frenchmen’s Hell
falsely claiming the birthright of the foal
A bleak sight
In starlight
The dark night before
The next daylight slowly begins
Folding into a new beginning
Hiding the various meanings of freedom
demanding variant forms to consider
as if daybreak was the dawn
of another committee meeting
But father
In the dream, I become the thief in the night
Steeling a Mustang away from its herd
Calling it my own
He hates me and I know
he always will
He loves the way I ride like no other
as if in stride
With the wind and then
steal the will of the condemned
Sending us both to a Frenchmen’s hell
Just as well
Father
Just as well
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