Garrison Poems

Come see my world where the body is found After the feast of worms is done; come see torn apart The life and prospects skipping rope in children's heart The dust drizzles atop the sutured sound And eyes litany of curtains And eyes gluttony of mountains ******* Scuttle dreams of womanhood or manhood Any child may do for the devil's device Any slime may carry shame and maggot's vice Those who die mysteriously are good Matters not where the blood drops lead Matters not how the victims bleed ******* Through the barking night of sad moaning dogs The battlefront kept a thin tenuous line I could not spoon the shrapnels from the trembling mind And the very sheet cringed the vipers' bogs Into which the curdled blood flowed Into which the tragic cocks crowed ******* There are no fences here, except the wall Of old zincs and shingles around the kind of house That after childhood is not built again ... house After house like lichen in the eye, fall Bringing neither fire nor summer Bringing neither hope nor terrror. ******* Think of those who live through it, us not you The rags swept to the corner of the eye. Bent To emptiness of fear in the scorned lament Think that somewhere the muzzle follows you And will not miss to tax the sun And will not flee where battle's run ******* Did you say how did my world come to this Scratching and gnawing and cold canker of sores How did it imaged so starkly private yours It's not our genes but our dreams that's amiss The churning of the world in dirt The churning of the heart in hurt ******* It is not my fault then but ours, and yet It is my death alone that buys the flowers And lingers, and lingers on the cloying hours And who but the living failures regret That we have no vision in light That we have no comfort in night. ******* Cringe me a mass on an abandoned hill No running water, nor school, nor light, nor plan To make more than community out of man Count the dollar until the heart grows still I'll show you where the error wakes I'll show you how the honor flakes. ******* Bones clock bones shivering under the bed They tried but did not shoot out the moon, you spy Neither potholes nor potmarks there, just a lie Trembling too in a drug addicted head That one fix will be the last now That one fix and then the false vow.