Dalmation Nation
On the one hand, it’s unknowable.
Berserk means bare shirt in Norse.
On the other, some folks flat out know.
Truth artifacts, then reasserts itself
in the fibers, in the lye, homemade soap,
handspun rope. The Flintstones,
the Jetsons, they did not know.
Otis Sistrunk though? That guy knows,
steam rising from his dome,
the U.S. Marines, University of Mars.
Harriet Tubman – need we say more?
Walt Disney both knew and didn’t know,
that villainess with the frosted hair
selling polka-dotted puppies for their fur.
Patty Hearst may well know, but she’s not talking.
She held that M1 like she knew something.
Field Marshall Cinque is another story.
He didn’t know so much as just act on behalf
of the forgotten, the vilified, the Symbionese.
Those that know are called divisive by those
that do not know. Truth is, though, the wounds
they are alleged to have opened were already gaping
and their action is just a last-ditch effort
to stop the bleeding.
Approaching Perfection
The burn zone is a bug buffet,
El Nino, Mercury in retrograde.
Woodpeckers work dead conifers.
I count the blood-red head bangs
From this room where they put me
When I got too close to the truth.
My top button has come undone.
That morning you found the wounded child
And bounded through the yard
Flannel and Carhartts in the slant light
Yelling urgent instruction.
I was pretty high, dicing an onion,
Listening to the Allman Brothers,
Seventeen minutes of white boys
Jamming about being tied to a whipping post.
The electricity of our bodies
Mingles with the lightning.
I try to remember how small talk works.
They bring me applesauce –
But I have bigger plans.
The Middle Boy
From the froth and after buzz, she paints
as dusk spreadeagles across the sandstone,
unbrushed smooshes of oil paint, fat swirls of color,
a firehose, a cauliflower and the middle boy,
isolated yet surrounded by his hapless kin.
Eventually, she will move to charcoal and slip away.
But here, at her apogee, she is pure kineticism,
a twin-engine plane of ketamine and speed,
a lockjawed tomahawk of burnt toast and gin,
the knot in the center of a golf ball.
Her exterior life has vaporized.
Unbathed, disintegrating, coiled like a viper,
her days are long stretches of catatonia
interrupted by tantrums of creation.
She has been 86’d from her circle of bon vivants.
Her headlamp burns into darkness.
She searches for the tunnel beyond the door,
the beating blood-muscle behind the ribs.
She can see striated claw marks of light.
She can see the middle boy.
Edward Johnson is a civil rights attorney who has spent the past 30 years representing people living on and over the edge of homelessness. He is currently living in a cabin in the North Cascades working on poems, old and new. He has work recently out or forthcoming from Eclectica Magazine, Down in the Dirt, Beatnik Cowboy, Indefinite Space, Main Street Rag, Ginosko Literary Journal, Packingtown Review, cc&d , The Dissident Voice and Evergreen Review.
