Bright Mississippi

It has always seemed easier to murder than to change.  The train tracks shiver like confetti in the Salis heat and emit a deranged stillness. There’s no woman on the lobby bench with a briefcase and a private detective. And The Nile Part 1 is scratched on this Sun Ra lp playing in the place of arrival calls so resin leaks from the thin and constant slap of the flute against the idea of a mutable totalitarian proletariat and the skeletons of Semple and his moonshine yarrow dance a farce of larks and logo into the slopes of mud and mama. I miss someone I cannot become. Someone sent me here to make certain to not become her gunned down story but I hunt for a patch of that distortion on the path to overcoming.  I hunt it down and kill it, trade its parts for a trip. This is violent time. This is clean up time. Elijah and Francis have made a pact. They are tenant farmers and lovers and at war and driven toward deliverance. When Elijah discovers Francis is pregnant with the child of their white landlord he grabs her by her perfect nappy roots and drags her to the Salis union station where no trains come in and the endlessly sinking flute maneuvers into arrow. He swings her by the hair and lets her land on the scalding iron tracks, walks away backwards awaiting the imaginary machine that will do the mercy killing for him, backs away into the coaxing bethlehem while she becomes the end of the world, bold and eternal. He raises the yellow girlchild as his own. She is beautiful and humiliating playing in the soft dirt with her brothers and sisters. Some rippling neon   answer to   a circus of whys   and yeses      is always  ready