Prelude

Balsa glider sorties attacking driveway gravel,                                
threats, ransacking some Mom’s back porch, unravel,                                      
you know who must control the skies. 

The other poor sonofabitch, gone country,                                                                 
sheds splinters on his hitch for the hunting,                                                             
his winters in effrontery ditched for its lies. 

While coffee counters secret what their denizens deny                                   
in spilled rank, serial number, regret, soldier-shy                                             
of non-dairy creamer fattening each spy.

Understudy dreamers we in this theatre miscast,                                
our Gettysburg address forwarded, arguably aghast,                                                        
to our Appomattox lorded over the fallen last. 

Each generation’s contested purchase,                                                   
its laughter elides its liturgical lurches                                               
over solemn loss lived where love seldom searches. 

Replete across these smoke-disguised silences,         
wreckage reviling once regaling dalliances,                                               
the collected dead joke of in intimate violences.                                                       

Diviners’ doubt now mutes the cannonade’s howling lungs.                               
Red seas departed, busted, our fallen tribe’s final rung.                                           
Red lips doth tease the told in unspoken tongues.