From July 31 2011 Sunday

To wear a uniform and to bear arms converges
if one also wears a bandolier, which in a manner of speaking
is bearing arms also. Hear me out, bear with me.
In the parade, the constable is proud, his moustache waxed for the event.
His family he displays like trophies in a glass case,
His lovely children, his wife, fleshed out for maternity,
Obedient by nature. The burghermeister credits him for much,
For keeping the peace, not the best of men but not the worst,
And affable besides, a real sport and Rotarian.
They are riding little trains in the square,
An event the town captures on its Facebook page,
But in his dungeon, he becomes a different creature.
Whose work is dirty yet necessary. The fingernails
Of an inmate are pulled, behind a thick wall
Someone screams. No one upstairs needs to know,
Certainly no one marching in the parade, among the floats
Of wedding-cake on which a beauty queen balances.
No doubt a young spectator has the time of her life
Watching the whited spectacle on the main thoroughfare,
The excitement captured in a letter to her mum.
She’s an au pair from the provinces after all.

No end to the white t-shirts at the summer camp,
No end to the chain of supply and demand.
If the sentence is no longer parallel, there’s been a mistake,
Where is the root of the mistake that has derailed
The natural order of the sentence. Around the corner,
Improvement is fragile, culture is precarious,
While teeth can become carious at a late age,
No end to the rotten teeth-rows, to kids just out of school,
The crowds walking in different directions,
To the variety of white uniforms fashioned in a sentence


Bold, disembowel, trowel, pitchfork, mallet
The strength of the sunlight fails to grace the lawn
I passed who knows how many rows of horse-corn riding to Fairlee.
But the seed dries in the husk, the pith hardens as the husk splits, and when the rail falls, it furrows above the dried-up soil until it finds drainage, so it doesn’t soak anything, it only flows over everything it touches, hard soil, dried blades. It only passes.