ChickenBones: A Journal

for Literary & Artistic African-American Themes

   

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No time to dig a hole / throw up a wall / without leaving / our iron-barred room

 

 

I Aint No Alarmist

 

By Rudolph Lewis  

 

2006 things will get

funky as Falstaff & Iago

with lint in their pouch.

They'll wreck your life

for a shilling. Hope

copper-coin colored rolls

like crack boulders down a hill. 

No time to dig a hole

throw up a wall

without leaving 

our iron-barred rooms

addicted decades to take it prone

locked down in dreams

a savior arriving like buffalo soldiers

in the service of yet another conquest

.

But mercenaries are everywhere

battering down doors

 

They have chipped away

torn down castles: there ain't

much to hold them back now

 

The women, it’s their turn to strip

Then it’ll be children, handcuffed,

mugged to tears & nightmares

 

 

This time we pay for dreaming

*   *   *   *   *

posted 13 January 2006

 

 

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Related File:  Heartbreak Hotel   No Mardi Gras Without Soul   Postcard from Hell  Ode to Bowling Balls   Naked in the Outer Darkness

  Music That Heals   That Which Hurts  In a Time of Chaos    Down by the Riverside      I Aint No Alarmist  Wintertime in America  The Propaganda of History 

   No Mardi Gras Without Soul    We'll Never Be Back the Same Again    Which Way Freedom  Mosquitoes Fly Out My Head