Job 9:20, America, 2017
Though I am innocent I have enjoyed
an ease of travel and credit, cheap food,
piracy of intangible goods without consequence,
driven by envy of health care or family leave,
and that I live in a myopic fog
tearful in the bright lights of human virtues
is a tedious alternation of malaise and worship
for which my own mouth would condemn me.
They Found an Underwater Forest in Alabama
The words wouldn't bring it to me
not the fisher, nor the oiler
Not like saying they was the trees that escaped
or the sediment that slipped past I-10
while the dead wood drift took us down
twisted and crocheted us round each other
and Mobile day in and day out
passing through town
and we looked one way, two ways,
ever which a way an we saw nothing.
But if you told me in all my days
about this island under the waves
or this swamp in an ocean desert
well the words wouldn't bring it to me—
not the forest, nor the trees.
But I always knew we was sinkin.
I always bore the brunt of that
general drift of things, seein how
so much of us done sunk already,
and how the decorative coral and its allies
watch us hungry: C'mon you sumbitch.
Take the bait, pack it in. Call it a day,
dead wood drift. Call it a day.