by Patrick Werle
art by Josh Chambers
I think about the Southern things that ride my back-mind, the easy things, the rock-n-roll things and the boiling water things waiting for the macaroni from a box that I make for my children on a Monday evening when we have worked too hard and my wife is too sick, and Minneapolis in the nineties jumps to the front of my mind and how Bob Mould tried to rumor hang him-gay-self in the basement of a pricey liberal arts college on the other side of the river in St. Paul
and how one can die so young and so early and never leave a mark until years after the death filling a downtown punk rock bar with hopeful listeners and decent readers and i wonder if the world really is a changing shade of Candy Apple Grey falling Piccadilly breath and chutes and ladders and lands of sweet teeth covered in the ash of burned books and burned schools and burned things we never talk about in mixed company as we stain bloodlines with issues of cattle and creeping things and we are hauled in one more time for the line-up because we show up in color and we show up in fear and we show up in force
I am only small miles from the Berryman death bridge where he jumped where his poetry died on rocks by mere feet missing the water and maybe only crying for help and hoping to be pulled from the current and to live again, and we have gods with other plans and we tempt it when we need the attention learning that lines cannot be crossed and crossed back
a true gentleman will eat the bullet here in the Northern things our guns hide and we pride ourselves on a false idea of liberal and masculine when secretly we wish we were someplace else drinking from the bottle on Sunday morning, shadowing regrets and me I want to be 25 and in another language crying for freedom and death to governors and violent cultural rapists in black t-shirts and well chiseled jaw lines.
