Short Scalps Poems

Listen to poem:

Groves,
parallel patterned rows
(hardly higher than bushes),
dot and stretch up hillsides,
looking from a distance
much like cornrows
on the tight tan scalps
of hip young New York
subway riders.
Luscious fruits,
at closer range,
mimic setting suns
boldly drawn in crayon:
oranges evoke essence,
name their own color....

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Hunted for their scalps
they had to run long distances
forever retreating
into to the heated lung
of copper canyon
(the last outpost of heaven).

Today they mind their own
sowing charred fields
milking parched goats.
Cartels are close by
growing illicit things
hiding from greasy sins
wearing bones of the desperate
like cheap costume jewelry.... 
Saiting the darkness of our indifference-...

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Damn arrows are flyin'
We're circled and taut,
Got shotguns and six shooters,
You should see how we fought!

They burned sixteen wagons,
Took fifty-odd scalps,
Abducted all our women,
And two of our Ralphs...

Why did they take 
Those weary old men?
Maybe they're gay,
Or just had a yen

To burn a few white men
The Ralphs were whiter than most...
But, I supposed by now,
They're merely Ralph-toast!...

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callously the world had split
two hemispheres disconnected
scalps and war chests decorated
glamorous uniforms 
heaving with medals
speechless arithmetic 
spacious troops on the map

her mind severed in pain
corporeal numbness leaking
from a crashed skull bone
squirting brain matter
and lost hope

displaced she roamed the ruins
her only salvation that
shrapnel had formed
a lacuna of blood
where semblance of
left right and wrong
now withered in vain...

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How terrible and perfect
the shark and the spider.
How forever unknown, 
much more than we 
who try to explain them are.

Weigh the salt, weigh the water,
weigh the dust.  Put it in a bucket
with a hank of hair,
add a soupcon of moonlit fantasy
pour it over new mown hay.

Beings are beginning to sprout
under our scalps.
Mindful beings
who do not pluck bones out of the air
and call it truth.

Stop denying the obvious.
We are not alien Gods, we are
sharks and spiders....

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