A spread fan of newspapers catches the eye,
tall tales set apart by fruity colors
for the magpie-dim, slim gray margins
for the bottom-liners, fetish of spiked heels
never far from mind, ejaculation just a dial tone away.
This morning the widows set a wicked man’s face
on peppery fire. Tomorrow they’ll face a
horsewhipping from the morals brigade.
Tit for tat to fuel the endless feud, boys
not yet born already minced and eunuched
through a warm evening’s sweep of drumfire.
And in the space of a common enough digression
(grasping the flashlight and lowering its beam
to solidify the cave scribblings, altering the font
from decorative spiders to a sunken genealogy of kings ;
looking up the nautical distance between Abidjan and
Savannah, Paramaribo and Riga, estimated travel time
measured in days of hope, minutes of terror)
and in the blink of a distracted eye the wicked man,
however newly disfigured and shockingly unrecognizable,
rolls out of the hospital bed
and escapes with never a backwards look.
A spread fan of newspapers catches the eye,
a howling trapped within the pursed and painted lips.