Wednesday, February 11, 2009

I Can't Come Clean



I CAN’T COME CLEAN

another rainstorm, another night
the train rushes past cornfields,
a ruined city, the red wink
of a soft drink machine, a mile
away, in a dead parking lot

hand and forehead pressed
bone white against club car window,
ginger ale and crackers to calm
my nerves, though I’m not even
suspect in the Terre Haute carnage
three hours by rail behind me

I am so old, I have outlived Bundy
and Gacy and the BTK Strangler,
so old a stiff drink cannot help,
a quick confession cannot hurt,
hand and forehead smashed bone

white against wet glass, left eye
seeing vacant streets, right eye
seeing right eye and a man never
in his right mind, hand falls away,
making a sound I heard Janet Leigh
make in that shower in that movie

in my youth

6 comments:

Charles Gramlich said...

Dude, that one rocks. Very powerful. I get all kinds of feelings from this one.

horatio salt said...

powerful imagery. that first paragraph kills.

James Robert Smith said...

Nice poem.

I really like that photo of the destructo stuff. Buildings reduced to brick and mortar rubble, revealing old, hidden signs for stuff people stopped caring about decades ago. There's something genuinely sad about that.

Michael Fountain: Blood for Ink said...

Half the things I've written could take place against the backdrop of that top photo. "It's like we're bruddahs!" as Bruno Kirby would say.

Capcom said...

Nice.

And sometimes things get torn down while people still care about them. :-(

RK Sterling said...

Good stuff, Wayne.