Untitled

The Shreveport Poems:
SKULL & BONES SONGS

by
Francis D. Grabau
(1/01/04 - 7/15/04)

SHREVEPORT

The Dead
float by on flimsy barges
drifting downstream to New Orleans.

It's time for Mardi Gras, they say, read me passages from
Huckleberry Finn. Backwards. They're possessed of a strange
humour, pose themselves in Renaissance velvets, in lush silks of crimson
and scarlet draped on their empty bones. Small patches of dried skin
stretch across their jaws, cling to their bare vertebrae. Sometimes, they wave
their knuckled fingers, ornately faceted rubies, glowing emeralds hang there like
eyeballs fallen from a golden face. They like to talk to me in that old black magic
called Voodoo.

All these elegant souls hover in Shreveport. The Dead claim
they're heading South to that great Coal Sack in the long
forgotten sky. Down to the Gulf they go, down again below
the Equator like Magellanic boats rounding the Cape of
Good Hope, circling the Cape of Fear signaling some Morse
code, some baroque Cajun lingo over their Half-Haitian
brows. They tell me shrive is a sad word sounding like guilt
seeking release. Hear how it hisses, they laugh, like
small pieces of fish sizzling in the grease of a
Gumbo.

The Dead say this place is stagnant, a harbor full of whoring
souls needing forgiveness, unable to give it. Lost in
Shreveport. Tricky place, full of gracious
postures. Posers.
Ghosts

dancing inside the Grail, wear purple over
their bones. They keep grinning, very French
grins. Dip their fingers deep like ivory chips
into the holy bowl: bless you, they click in
chorus. We never seem real to them. They are
loose as starlight, while we cling like barnacles
to our round boat under the
Voodoo Moon.

Love, say the Dead, is a kind of liquid bone
burning in the currents of the heart. Who knows
what they mean by that! They love to spin their spirals
pulling our souls toward them. Kiss the Grail just once, they say, and
you're dead too. Your lips taste a different love in the green under-light of that other
cauldron. Drink deep of yourself where the dead hold you, the way a picture hangs on a
wall. Wailing. O, the Grail is Empty. A round frame full of nothing. Listen up, Shreveport, God
has no use for guilt, it's just a crazy Voodoo riff. God told me so herself, -Mardi Gras is coming, it's time
to love your dead, and all their bluesy
jazz.

SHROVE TUESDAY
Penance. Penance. Punish
yourself. Shrove Tuesday's here, Lent's just
around the corner, -say the ghosts of Priests, keys
of Christ's Kingdom hanging from their belts. These guys
are rock-hard inside, don't want to have fun, don't believe in
that. They're worker ghosts. Bankers, fiercely American. Don't have
bones like the real Dead, just glow the gray-green color of crisp
dollar bills. Poppycocks, Will 'o the wisps. Saying they want to
sell me their indulgences, save my christian soul. Junk
bonds. They think they need to shrive me, claim
Jesus founded their Federal Reserve, -I should
welcome him warmly into my heart. Internal
Revenue Servants wanting to invest me in their
gloom. Sickly band of sad sinners, they play
upon my childhood fears, my adolescent
memories…

Stop pulling on your penis this very minute, Mother
screams entering the room. Slip those sheets up
over that thing, just what do you think
you’re doing! God will get you
for that vile sin. I'm telling you,
boy, pull up your sheets. She
thinks she's being clean, responsible -like the Federal
Communication Commission. She's not fond of sticky
sheets, says she's tired of washing them.
Shreveport,

where the good old boys weave the winding sheets
hanging bold on the ships’ masts. Lusty golden
cargoes down in the boats' bowels. Hidden
like the Pirates who don’t do penance
either. Don’t believe in it, -Ash
Wednesday or not! Shrove
Day is here and they have
the Saviour as their
stowaway hanging-out in the hold, fasting
40 days and 40 nights, getting ready for his big
passion play. Mardi Gras

swells like a thorn in his holy head, a spear in his sacred side. Quick,
somebody, get the grail, gather all that gorgeous blood in a mystic
cup. Cook it up with some seasoned guilt, some Cajun crawfish! Let it congeal. Turn
into gold, into money, - Holy Blood Pudding. Look,

how our sins pervert us. Filthy sex everywhere. Grinning
at us from the lips of Ashcroft, Rumsfeld, Bush. Guilty
as charged, they crow -innocently. Their black
wings flapping like flags in our faces. God
bless America, they shout. God blast
those heathen terrorists. Smear the mark of Cain upon
their evil brows, the tell-tale dust of uranium over their depleted
heads, - Savage Muslims, lousy Arabs, lazy Caddos. Ashes to
Ashcroft, cry the Dead, dust to Waco. The business of wanton
smiles. Oily graciousness. Polite and
deceptively mannered. It's
Fat Cat

Tuesday in Louisiana, time for the King's Cakes. Dead baby dolls
baked into each bite. False Angels singing extra low frequencies
mess with the circuits in your brain. Don’t think about it, Faith is all you
need. Faith in the Corporate Trinity, the red, white, and blue blood of the poor
saved by the suffering flag of Jesus, sent from his Divine Father, the Godhead of the Celestial
Reserve crucified for your Sins. These are the real men in black your dear Momma
never told you about. But the Dead will:
Barksdale,

hums full of nuclear warheads buried deep in silos of cement, forcing
the Dead from their dirt. Skulls and Bones. Jolly old Mister
Rogers. Television. Telecom. Teleport yourself right
out of here. Shreveport, wrapped in secrets, the
Bay of Pigs. Mardi Gras, Fat Tuesday in French
where Freedom fries fall into the Red River
washing down to New Orleans, freedom
fries forming log-jambs the Dead use to
build their rafts. Captain Henry Miller
Shreve. More Voodoo. Mudbug
Madness.

The Dead move inside shells dreaming of
crawfish - Magical jumbalaya. A Nation
wrapped in sticky sheets, sweet magnolias, mockingbirds. Shrove
Tuesday, feast of Skull & Bones, radiation ceremonies. Bombs
baptized in hot perfumes from laissez-faire religion. Mad
people disease. Gallant eels afloat in the Southern
swell of richly gobbled prions. A true blue
(and bless your little heart)

Confederacy of Dunces.
Weaponeers
surfing subliminal waves of Holy Mass Destruction. Burning Crosses like
good victims shrouded in white sheets, in the hidden hoodoo of the
racist voodoo of their gracious Ku Klux Klan. O yes, Miss Scarlet,
ride the Rapture of the Righteous
Whirlwind!

CARNIVAL
You got no sense of humor, my friends like to tell me. Always
filling your head with Dark thoughts. Cheer up, kiddo, it's
Carnival time. My friends are

funny. Quaint. Downright
queer, -if you ask me, and I
know you won't. The
Dead

are my other friends. Mockingbirds. They
cover the sticks of their flimsy barges in fragments of
silver and gold, are their own Skull & Bone Society. Grin
as they pass on the bayou air. Oleanders. Real
Bonesmen

never eat at Burger King, ketchup is their idea of perfect
gloom. I give them lots of room in my Shreveport life. But then, -I always
have. Born dead, I guess, in marble-stepped Baltimore. Reading Edgar Allan
Poe in Row houses. Carnival time means

farewell to meat. I drink coffee, smoke cigarettes, instead. Blowing
second-hand smoke on the air keeps my friends at their much
needed distance, let's me feel wispy. Smoke and
mirrors mark my medicine way or, as the Dead
always say, -your poison is your path.

Improbable masks
cover the meat of our bones. Trap us flat inside our flesh. Sometimes the Dead
think we're Zombies, see us as the Undead, ask hard questions, -like why do we look past
them when they have something to say and want to play. Kids chanting in chorus,
Mi -ssi- ssi- ppi ?

Am i ? -ssi- ssi- pee pee, i ?   … sounding by the Red River.

The silt of their stately song flows
downstream as native blood from Shreveport, joins
the Mississippi, makes mud-bug madness in the Mardi Gras of
New Orleans.

A macabre sense of humor creeps into me from the crawfish, I swim in the cauldron
with the Dead. Low in the winter trees lining the river, Mockingbirds sing. They
imitate sounds of warriors biting King's Cake in Nuclear Barksdale. The birds

in our perpetual facades warn us: it's always Carnival Time, our poison is
our only path. We are the Voodoo Bonesmen crying farewell to our
meat. The Dead

welcome this purple humor, find it toxic. Ironic. Call it
Hollywood, the curse of the black pearl. Drink it
down with stump-hole whiskey crooning
all the while: "feu follet" -they say, you
are our friend     -at last!

POT-POURRI
Silver rain drops
drip from arching stems
outside my window. Wet rose
branches but no buds in bloom.

It's February in Fabulous Shreveport, Casino to the largest Rose
Garden in the World. Day after day the sunless gray weather
presses in, calls to mind that Voodoo gris-gris carried in a sack
around the neck. Gris, you know, is Freedom-less French for
good old American Gray. Sounds of Confederate Glee. Gris,
the Dead like that.

I told you how they floated by last month -just to chew my
bones, give me the juju of their gris-gris !   Okay, so they
say: 'The South Will Rise Again'. Hold up
some huge hypo of a mojo
needle, two feet long -if
it's an inch. The glass

intricately wrought with Arabic
letters, a vial embellished in crude blobs of stained
light. Shades of purple, ruby, and green. A Gothic Voodoo
needle. Gleefully they show it to me, -like grade 'B' actors in a Frankenstein
flick. Look, they say, today we shot-up the President, pumped him full of
gris-gris down in Old New Orleans! They stand tall, look
skeleton-proud.

So what, says I: -you're all too
pig-foot weird for me! I mean,
I really like your get-up, your
barges, your brilliant bones,
but ... but, …but
I've got work to do. My purring computer, my perfect
poems. Can't you take your Movie elsewhere ? Oh,

how the grieved Bonesmen brooded
like low clouds dampening the night air, -heavy, dejected, as if
they really were dead. You'd think I'd broken their bony little hearts! Okay, I say,
let's have it; just what's that puky looking stuff in the vial ?
Right away,
the one they call Lafitte
throws his left arm bone up, defiantly. Where his crimson sleeve
sweeps the air a picture unfolds. America, an aerial view -from the Western
Rockies to the Atlantic Shores. We're all suspended there in the keen electric air
while hypnotically they croon to me their Cryptic Tales, -how

the river is a sacred gumbo, an enchanted snake, how run-off dances from North, West, East,
flows South down the Mississippi through the Bayous to old New Orleans. Carries white toxins, ancient debris
tumbling through its waters, swirling in the silt. Bones of Lakotas, Arapaho. Spirit shards from the Kiowa, the Caddo, -tribes and clans
too numerous to name toss in the mix. Geronimo stands boldly beside Lafitte, Baudelaire
beside Geronimo, feathers from Woodpeckers, Mockingbirds, Eagles, tremble down
the sky. The Dead say they've stirred up this potent Swamp-Pop, a silty
juju juice. Shot it through the putrid flesh covering the Zombie
Bush. Claim it will make him
Visible
seen for what he really is. I consider them seriously
mad, other-worldly, not pertinent to my life. They get the point and
disappear. An Email

drops down from New Orleans. Marie Laveau laments
how the heavy traffic makes her late for work, how
the goddam President messed up her day. I find
that perfectly ludicrous. Tune in the
radio. Zombie, suddenly
Visible

lands in Atlanta. (Protestors
line the streets) Bends his knee by the
Dream King's Grave. News. It's another wreath-laying gesture,
another fake turkey stuffed like a rubber up the ass of Iraq. Fade to
black. Photo -op!

A fund-raising dinner deep in the folds of the Patriot South. His trip to the grave of a
Nation's slain Hero marks the seal of anthrax on the taxpayer's
backs. Look, how the

Twin Towers

topple, watch while the scapegoat
bleats. Golly gee, says I to me, another
non-lethal gesture, another quick double-cross. O,
Malfaiteur!
Les enfants terribles, les enfants des Ombres! The children of shadows are restless once more,
Orisas and Loas again are afoot. Their message so hauntingly plaintive -like terrorist cries of
money, like voices of sulphur and honey ! Must be
that giddy juju, must be the
Voodoo of the
Dead. Down

past the dark French Quarter
where the trumpet of Sachamo blasts,
deep in the Congo Square beat
the drums that remember the past.

There where the Jazz Moon rises
Old Papa La Bas stands, carves
a cold name backwards
on the white of a black
hen's egg:

Egroeg M. Hsub.

O, Pot-pourri. Damballa ! Yoruba ! Here come the Dead, again. See
how they're dancing and singing, watch them ecstatically
sway -while somewhere a real rose is blooming. And it's
music is pure mambo magic, and it's scent is
impeccably
red.

MIDNIGHT IN THE MOCKINGBIRD GARDEN

The cryptic hand that plays the haarp
breaks the heart.

Omerta,
mocks the bird calling from the trees. No
breeze ruffles her feathers. It's midnight where the rains
freeze and the temperature drops in Shreveport. Cold
water

glistens in the moonlight, cracks
underfoot where I tread
toward the Dead.

Each Loa has her mystic pattern. Beckons
through the lacy ice, tells where the quick
stars come down to speak:

-vèvè-

giving light from old to young. Like the lines folded in the palm of my
hand, they are the 'fait accompli' or what we
hold most dear. Hold to the bones of your
dead. They never
'passed over'.

The Tomb at Yale yawns wide to swallow me. Eulogia mumbles her
ivy spells, -dumb euphemisms, false contenders, spin enforcers
crying doom: " Tout y est faux! "

No, say the Dead, listen to the mockingbird,
you souls of Shreveport. Hear how void of
eloquence Yale's faux Eulogia is:

Omerta -the Scarlet curse of hollow sound that mocks the living song.

True Angels are our Dead, the far Ancestors singing in our bones. They urge us
play, come to Carnival, say farewell to meat. Eat
ourselves at stroke of Midnight here, in the
Mockingbird's garden where bones
croon like dry doves making
music all night
long.

They do not sing of Death, they sing the 'coup de grace' !

If ever I should cease to love no shriving will suffice to save me.

THE PASSION OF BONESMEN
Seen in the light of day the Dead seem
kinky -sunlight shining through dry ribs, no
glow of white bone against black sky, no
pale moonlight or moody mystique, -they just
look flat. Somber. Like
the Stickman
at the craps game when snake eyes are rolled. Make
no bones about it, in Ceasar's palace the die
was cast long ago. Miserere,
the chorus replies:
Azzah,

chant the Arabs gathering their bones. Fling the dice and
win the Fish Boy's cloak. The seamless hoax woven by a sadist
Dad, designed to pull the whole house down. Sorry, Mister Einstein, Big Daddy
does play craps with his chosen boys, keeps his girls on the side where they swoon (dolorosa)
hot and waiting with precious oils.

Kiss the feet of his only Stickman, and he'll toss your broken spine
across the table where he comes again and again to judge the living and
the dead. Ah, consumatum est, and how was it
for you. Dies

irae, dies illa, say the
puppet faithful. Days of delicious
wrath spent squirming in guilt. But
the Dead know better.

Bare bones sharp against bright sun, they see how the dice are loaded, cut
from their own hard stuff. They tell me it's tough to strike a match in falling rain, see
its flame in solar glare. All the burning Born-Agains declare:
strike the Stickman, quit the Christ and
damned if you're not jinxed. Vile

Evil riots in your Soul. Satan rattles his sulphured
chains, sends the Hounds of Carlyle stalking your tail. Heaven
thunders and Earth rips asunder. Your interest rates rise. Your ass is
fried. Think Eternal Damnation! Think Enronization. Think it out
all over again:

The Passion of The Dead

keeps their bones together, cuts the crap and casts the dice. They
float before me, these brave Other Bonesmen cavorting in carnival light, devoid of guilt or any
meat. Slowly and slowly they drift- lentement, into Lent.

O Friends of the Dead lend me your tongues, tell all good knuckleheads how crap rolls around. Speak
the tale of the Ides of March, the Senators' thrusts of knives and circus. Invoke the recall of terminal
taxes. Wait,

I hear myself say in my head, maybe
these glamorous sunlit Dead are
nothing but dumb and conspiracy-fed
liars. They claim those Yankees of Skull & Bones fame
cast snake eyes down for Geronimo's brain. Oh, Jumpin
Jesus, this sure is swell, some fool's done caught me in a rhymed
voodoo spell ! But

outside my windows where the rare sunlight beams hundreds of
blackbirds swoop around in my dreams. They fly like songs
through the floating bones warning of Tyranny's rising
tones. O, Camelot! Ah, coup
d'gras. The magic bullet

through the liberal brain, the bitter
crown of piercing thorns. That so slow turn of the open car
on the Texas map to the corporate star. The old rugged cross
to the shareholder's gain where tortured interest meets
sweet christian pain, and bleeds like wounds in the Earth's
holy rain. Drink

from the cup, the zealots say,
buy the nail and piously watch and pray.
Be a voyeur in some theatre's dark,
let Jesus into your sinful heart
where his suffering hammer can pound and pound
that sacred, numbing, prozac sound. Pornography,

the street folks say, is Christ In Action
as the CIA. Sweet Mother, Erzulie, please
birth them away. Thus speaketh the Dead
this rare sunny day.

LAISSEZ LES BON TEMPS ROULEZ

Come on, y'all let the good times roll
right over Barksdale into your soul.
Ignore the Bokor who stole the white house
his roots are zombie, his father's a louse!
Two Android Bonesmen are all we got up front,
but the key to a field goal is just a good punt. Kick

off the blues, the terrorists and bombs… -shit, I mean
Merde! What's happening here ? Roll out
the barrels, swill down the beer, there's
a mean haarp bouncing off
the ionosphere, even the fish
are acting real queer having
same sex marriage while they
leap through the air!

Laissez les bons temps roulez,
In America it's April Fools Day,
things just aren't going our way.
The President's a closeted gay
we can't impeach him away,
or so all the experts say,
eating their curds and whey,
O Laissez les bon temps roulez!

The Nation's a bummer
on a barbecue roll,
corporations live cheap
on the federal dole.

Crude oil's the color of our national soul,
our flag runs up a greased black pole,
even the land we live on we stole. Yes,
the whole tale is incredibly droll, but
hey, let the good times roll.

Cheap tunes bounce around in my head,
I'm thinking maybe I'm already dead or just
got up on the wrong side of bed … the
would-be poet said, filled with doggerel
dread.

O, I hear America singing
like a jangle of tin bells ringing
to which the rich are clinging, O
I hear America singing.

And I hear the dolphins sighing
and all the redwoods crying
to feel Muslim infants dying
while Americans go on lying.

But hey, I'll just reason it away
like the folks in the media say, O
laissez les bons temps roulez!
It's nothing but Born Again Voodoo, and
tell me, just what would you do ? Sound
the mirror, call the Hoochie Coochie Man.
Play the mush mouth shuffle all over
again. What,
hold my nose and vote for you?
I know the difference between a nail and a screw;
there's no way, America, I can vote for you. O
laissez les bons temps roulez! Let the good times
blow you away! That's what the Jesus Folk pray
for Allah's kids every day. Laissez
les bons temps roulez. But

the Dead still relentlessly say
we are throwing our flesh away
just to map the geography, feed the
cryptocracy, live the hypocrisy, bleed at the
orders of Skull &Bones.

" Gentlemen songsters off on a spree
Damned from here to eternity

Lord have mercy on such as we
Baa, baa, baa! "
from:
The Whiffenpoof Song
Yale

THE GOLD RUSH

California calls just when I'm descending
deep into New Orleans. No time now
to get the feel of it, -the Big Easy
sinking like America's Venice where the toxic Mississippi
pours into the polluted Gulf. Swampland. Poisons in the fish, in the salty
oysters, in the gourmet spots dotting the famed French Quarter.

The Mother of Gothic Vampires has fled
this Crescent City. The X-Mayor's Son cut a deal dumping the bayous
full of nuclear sludge. It surfaces in sausages, in crawl fish artistically
arranged on immaculate plates. Terraced like the wrought-iron
porches, filligreed like the wrought-iron gates. The Big Easy
goes down for the count. Hard
money

calls. I turn to my pure white Toyota
to drive at the crack of dawn. On the left
front fender Papa Guede squats, -clowning, a cigarette
hung from his jaw bone. Papa Legba paces beside him:

"Hey, white boy " they call out to me, " right now
you do (voodoo) really be
at the Crossroads, by the eerie Porteau Mitan Tree. What
you gonna do, Son, let your petty 'ti bon ange' trick you away from the
bayous ? Let your greedy 'gros bon ange' lure you away from
the Dead ? "

O, 'maitre-tet', I stammer. Where is my 'higher self' ? I know I'm
the fool sounding Voodoo in the mirror, but I really do gotta go
-me oh my oh- me gotta go drive this Toyota out of these bayous. It's California or
bust! It's pure white man's lust, Oh baa, baa,
Whiffen-poof !

Papa Guede shakes his shank, Papa
Legba rubs his crotch. Swiftly
I slip to the driver's
seat. Together,
arm-in-arm
they do a wry grin, cast a living pattern -some
purple vèvè onto the road before me. It sings
like a fishnet a violet song, it pulls
my wheels smoothly along
trailing fragments of bones and
tolling gongs fixed to the rear
bumper. JUST MARRIED. DEAD
LOCKED. Eat rice, you fool,
not gold!

                             VÈVÈ

GERONIMO

crops up, -riding shotgun beside me, says
his real name's Goyathlay, says it rimes with
'boy at play', but he's not playing. He's one
pissed-off Apache, claims
the Tomb Boys up at Yale
stole his elbow along with his skull. Frantic
to mimic his Medicine Way. Says they really don't know
how to play, they're all fucked sheep afraid of the day who sneak
about at night. Right,

I tell him, but how come your bones so loquaciously sit
in my Toyota like a perfect fit, -skull, jaw, elbows
and all ? Why must I ride in a car next to bones
talking to me in such pissed-off tones ? What is
the purpose of this, may I ask, and why
does a skeleton drink from a flask ? I think
you're using your bones to mask
the true intention of your task
with me in my pure white
Toyota ! Well,

say what you may, says Goyathlay, but
I'm here to offer my Medicine way. So you
need to know the real Geronimo since you're from
the clan we call Gray Bow -that's why you're driving
this car so slow as if it were night and the sky
full of snow. Now

watch the road cuz your muffler hangs
too low, and if it falls you'll lose both
your balls or what this Bonesmen
so cryptically calls your, …uh
-French cojones !

Okay, Shrewd Bone Man, I'll do what you ask, but
tell me, honest -what's in that flask; I mean
the one you're guzzling from -is that your
medicine or is it rum ? And by the
way -my muffler ain't my balls, just
like a river ain't Niagra Falls. But

Old Goyathlay claims we must solemnly pause
and give some thought to the nature of skulls. So

I shift the car into cruise control mode hoping to keep it aimed on the road,
(but somehow I think I'd actually rather not talk with this feisty cadaver). O, merde,
here comes more dead bones jabber!

Geronimo's Jabber

You may say I'm just a cadaver, but really
what does that matter ? I'm here
to teach you in tones the tale of
all my bones, for words like birds
fly away (or so we Apaches
say) but tones drum into
your bones like spells
cast by cellular
phones.

I'm the Backdoor Man named
'the one who yawns' who claims
the living are often mere pawns
caught between sunsets and
endless dawns.

I say, they run from the dead,
hide their heart inside of their head,
can't see beyond their senses.

Folks don't factually die
the way they claimed I
died due to something
they called 'pneumonia'

-neither cancers nor strokes put an end to folks
they just give up their breath and die of
plain death. Though

they're usually not seen
that still doesn't mean
they're not living on some other level.

As flesh can't stand alone without help of
hard bone, so the living can't live without
breath the dead give when we turn back
to earth the bones of our birth. I am

wise Goyathlay and fierce Geronimo
come here to tell you the story I know:

Not ten years had passed, as you Living reckon time,
from my body's death to these gravediggers' crime.

Hellbender,
Barebones,
Caliban, and
Dingbat
                  -chanting three, two, and two
(now see -with that- what you can do)
Gentlemen songsters off on a spree
up to no good but skullduggery.
They had no love for such souls as me, -baa, baa, baa.

It was late in May and dark at night,
they were six army captains tipsy and tight,
(for two more were kept out of everyone's sight)
fire-water burned in their veins making light
of their dumb skullduggery, -and they kept singing:
We're poor little lambs who have lost our way, -baa, baa, baa.

Pickaxes rang on the ground hard as stone,
making sounds of earth on earth alone
'till they finally dug down into my bone,
-and they kept singing: We're little black sheep who have gone astray,
-baa, baa, baa.

Dingbat,
Caliban,
Barebones, and
Hellbender,
                        -the whiffenpoof brothers with axes that fell
while the magic of their singing cast its Puritan spell,
chanting two, two, and three
they stood grinning down at
me. And then, what the
heck -they hacked off
my neck.

Chanting three, two, and two
they'll do the same for you. They're Boodle Boy songsters
still off on a spree though they're doomed from here to eternity
-they keep singing: -baa, baa, baa.

You may say I'm just a cadaver, but really
what does that matter ? I'm here
to teach you in tones the tale of
all my bones, for words like birds
fly away (or so we Apaches
say) but tones drum into
your bones like spells
cast by cellular
phones.

"We have done with Hope and Honour,
We are lost to Love and Truth,
   We are dropping down the ladder rung by rung,
And the measure of our torment
Is the measure of our youth.
God help us, for we knew the worst too young!"

from
-Gentlemen Rankers-
Rudyard Kipling

                                                  …to be continued; posted July 15, 2004