They’re shipping knock-offs to Haiti.
(They forgot to send me.)
Somewhere across the ankles of the Atlantic beneath a sign for second-floor SUVs and torn up pink-slips, un-housed and dispossessed eyes peer through the gates that protect the imposter goods.
Officials cringe
when the boys
eyeball
the sneakers
that fell from their boxes like frozen feet that had been cut off and tossed out the back of the truck, sprinkling the broken boulevard like raindrops on an ice cream cone.
A cop lobs fake Nikes at a pensive boy with a Veteran’s limp and oversized coat. He laughs as the boy hops home with two left shoes and the cluster of police cruisers split into a compass of blazing sirens
each car
thinking he was the
North Star.
A red scarf emerged from the dispersing crowd.
This crimson-caped man’s
mad-dog
hands
clutched the air around him in freak-spasm night.
He lost his shoulder and dropped his jaw foaming at the mouth:
And a sound fell like a flame that had been fanned from the deep well of an executioner’s oven.
Ship.
Me.
To.
Haiti.
And the
blisters on the balls
of his feet
cut through the thick rubbers he wore and eventually rooted him into an eternity far beyond slums or beaten down blocks or inner city apathy.
Ship.
Me.
Or.
Shoot.
Me.
His fingers crawled like worms sprouting over a dead soldier’s bayonet. His scarlet fever snapping in the breeze like a matador. He waited to rotate in the barrels of the city’s finest. He just hoped their bullets would be as bright as he was.
An old woman shook her head and said to her husband, “That boy is crazy. Too much anger. Ain’t gonna bring em nothing. Bad for the heart”, she said.
He blew a kiss as they whisked by into their steeple.
He’d never be this again: a tsunami in the drone of the limping ghetto night.
For blood
is less likely
to boil
as we
get older.
…So I ask you have we truly hit the end, the rusted sediments, the ancient depositories of whales long dead and barnacles who swamped and sucked to stay alive?
Just a school of fish trembling, tremoring, and trying maybe that’s all we are: A school of fish, doomed.
Maybe we’re all madmen in scarlet scarves
knowing that shadows don’t lurk or loom
they simply stop being,
cease to follow
when there is nothing but stagnant air and a muffled heartbeat that barely brushes against the skin.
Deep schadenfreude
high as the cotton of a Mississippi nightmare
Ever seen a house on fire in the distance?
You know what every man is thinking?
“How beautiful that fire burns.
I’m just glad it’s not my house.”
(c) 2009, 2010 – from “Lying Meat & other poems beneath the Oil” by Dennis Leroy Kangalee
Dennis Leroy Kangalee 