Wooden Porch Swing in the Distance
behind the house, and just beyond the little woods of oaks, there’s an ancient cemetery where the confederate dead are buried in their sackcloths/ six of us are buried in here, too/ civil war is just another vulture’s boots/ the cemetery itself is dead/ not unlike a darkened theatre, and the second show is over/ the boys stole a six pack of beer from publix/ and poured a beer out onto each one of the six graves we dug here/ this is appalachia, and people still dig the graves if that is what they want/ you gotta bring your own shovel though/ the cemetery does not provide the shovels/ ours came from home depot, they are home depot shovels/ most people in this town have fled from one terror or another/ only to return/ i am not all that unlike the boys with their stolen sorries and their six pack which they poured on graves it was a symbolism i do not particularly share/ i can see the inside of their mouths when they articulate in bullet point bold all the insane things that were done to them over the short course of their motherfucker lives/ abuse/ but what exists beyond the horizon of abuse/ the goodietwoshoes will tell you hope/ like they have been beyond that horizon and they know/ they do not know shit/ we stand in the reproach of haunted vast arcades, full of petulance, chips on our shoulders the size of glaciers/ after they drain the beer from the very last can, they begin to laugh softly in a way that pierces the sunset’s last bones above the droning creak of a wooden porch swing in the distance/