Mind Bruises
I will tell you a sorrowful tale of an ancient time
when the turning years carved grooves into vinyl,
a time that changed everything and nothing.
He was a lad, a stripling, knobble kneed and roughly handled.
A youth with a common history told a thousand times
in any slum-clamped town.
A cultural weather mellowed him,
it gave the young a way to be poets, cynics, heedless pundits.
Rainbow children beguiled; they wed their minds
to a street corner weed, past its vows between them.
Then it was that mop haired songsters
again stirred his angry blood; he defied ruler and book,
forsook the hierarchies of the hard boiled,
long hair grew into words that shook as he danced
defying the soft shells of faceless egg men.
The boy drifted, still raw-boned, still trapped
by the rats in his head. Jail house beckoned;
bars griped his knuckles tight.
One night he became a storm in a windowless room.
They held his body down, beat it black and blue.
All he could think of as fists pounded broken ribs,
was if he yet lived, he would write it all out one day
yet still leave out the bad parts.
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