Confrontation

When the cops showed and shot the kid they made their best explanation, crafted with the finest excuses and burnished with a hint of truth. The kid was wrong, they said, and the rest understood. Wrong time. Wrong place. Wrong race.

Later the neighborhood gathered outside the precinct with signs and anger until the chief of police came down from city hall and spoke of the need for peace and calm and good intentions all around because what the people saw wasn’t what happened.

It happened fast, the chief said. And there wasn’t nothing to be done. Kid had a gun. Now go home with our apology bloodied and have a wake and eat some home cooking and forget about it.

Sweep it under the sheets. Cops covered bodies until the morgue men surfaced. It was standard. People should keep their knees on the ground.

And on the ground some bodies stayed for hours that kissed days as one death followed another in the city of hard justice. Rioters got sold to the highest bidder of prison walls. All was part of the deal that cops made with themselves known by undercover names such as community service and that which must be done.

John Baptist, mega man with a cursed leg, told the chief to make the truth known to all or suffer a fall. Chief called it a threat, and the troops gathered.

Troops had gear from last year’s clearance sale, black helmets and all sizes of boots and body armor and a few dozen explosive devices in case they couldn’t climb a wall or knock on a door. Nobody sat on the bench for this game. It was all hands on the street to meet a challenge to their authority.

Chief yelled through a bullhorn to come out and make peace with shackles and jail, but John Baptist doubled up his voice from inside the tenement and said no. He wasn’t coming out to be shot down and he wasn’t backing out of his promise.

John had rallied his own troops who gathered in halls and looked out from windows at the force the cops had mustered in the street. Cops had gas and large shafts of light they said fell down from heaven upon their goodness. They were forever right and not only that, had the weight of the law behind them.

The law was golden and shined when rubbed sideways. Law was supreme and adored and to question it a crime named resistance. The cops, born with decrees in their eyes, couldn’t see the irony of rules so loved they needed to outlaw opposition.

Another bullhorn blew the chief’s voice into the size of a man and his bloat enlarged even more as he said they were coming in with fire to burn out the rats who sat in the garbage of their lives and claimed to be kings.

And it was so. Cops spat long flames from black barreled throwers, but John Baptist fled out the back doors with his friends as the tenements burned. The fire killed the sky, filled it with smoke from cribs and books left behind.

John climbed down into the tunnels beneath the city and came up again in stealth behind the cops. If there was a street fair, they would be sitting ducks but in the reversal of fortune, the cops were cows to the slaughter.

As backlash, institutions flexed their recruits who had sworn allegiance and John Baptist became a most heinous wanted man. All the high sayers told their minions to find him upon pain of expulsion from the club. John Baptist must die.

He made it easy and entered their courts on his own, a thing they didn’t expect. John Baptist raised his hand and swore to the tell the whole truth if they would admit his testimony. An old judge peered down at the world from his bench and told John his guilt was preordained, and his days were short numbered. They put him in a hole and later placed his neck under a great falling blade.

It was too late to stop the idea, though. Word spread from ghetto to ghetto, and one by the one, all the false cops fell down.

All the false bosses of false faces renounced their position or suffered stones. Money men boiled or disavowed their greed.

In the end it all came around again, though. The wheel turns.

It turned for John Baptist as it had turned for others before him. Yet each time it rolled, the cycle of goodness grew longer and longer. And one day, from the sheer weight of crushed cruelty, the wheel may stop turning altogether. Then justice can finally cease its trembling.

Sacrifice

The night the assassination failed his mother died in spirit when she opened the winter door. He stood there, her son of no man. Dirty flakes of snow blew in.

What have you done? she asked, and the son of no man only grabbed his chest as if in pain and staggered inside. He had no answer, no external injury, no salvation.

Under the floor lay shades of truth that peered through cracks, truth that saw the son of no man insist his purity amidst the bloodshed. The world was against him. The world was wholly corrupt. He was the only honest man.

He was the only honest man for he bowed allegiance to his deceptions and his cries of reprisal. No one else had the courage. He had shattered all his mirrors and couldn’t see what he had become, mere dust that formed the shape of a man.

His mother took him by the hand and asked him in simple words if he had ever loved her, and if he had, would he kiss her on the cheek, and tell her please, even a lie, that he was well again, that he remembered what she hoped for him as a child. The son of no man sat with his mother in the twilight of innocence and broke open his mouth to speak of graves he had yet to make. And of those he had yet to rob.

I will be supreme, he said.

It was an impressive display. And the nation, too sick to feel its illness, rejoiced. They waved flags and guns, cheered, invented beautiful names for some, and foul ones for others.

With gradual lowering his mother dipped her face to his feet and offered her son a shelter for his cruelty. Take it out on me, she said. I’ll suffer so the world does not. A mother must protect her son.

But there were millions of foreshortened lives viewed from his lens. There were clouds of toxic gas in his dreams, carts of corpses to haul. Emptiness drove him.

No, mother, he said. I won’t take it out only on you.

I gave you life, she said.

And I gave it back.

Bread broke and they ate a simple meal with apple pie for dessert. For a few moments they were one. For a short while mother and son returned to his boyhood when a boy of no father commanded ants with his sticks and furrows. Look how they go where I say, he said. His mother hugged him.

But then boots knocked on the winter door and memories returned to their cells. The boots entered, praised the smell of home cooking and brought news of an inferno of excitement that swept over the land in the wake of the assassination.

Attempted, you mean, said the son of no man. The boots stomped their assent to attention. Of course. It was a failure of God, they said, but the son of no man didn’t understand the irony and only licked a trace of blood from his hand.

Let us suck the prison from your mouth.

Allow us to appeal to Jericho.

We’ll write the cost of sacrifice on an eagle and set it free.

Each boot had guidance, advice for the son of no man in his quest for more power and ignorance. He listened with his stomach filled with pie, his mother at his side. But she had died in spirit when the bullet flew short. It had entered her own heart and lodged. She was a mother above all and couldn’t bear to see her son so slandered by his own words and deed.

It was a rough corrugated way for her to remove her denial. She had to look at her deeds, too. Beneath her public concealment she knew she had done something wrong with her son. Many times, on the lawns and by the sea, she must have reached for the wrong example in anger. Such sons didn’t grow from clean seeds.

Come, she said. Her son moved closer.

Yes, mother.

I love you and I’ll take the blame.

For what?

For you my son.

The son of no man laughed, but his mother remained still. She was old and had nothing to lose. The world was upside down. Coolness burned and kindness angered. Wrath pleased. Mother lowered her hand. The knife of deliverance was wrapped in her robe. Its blade still harbored the scent of apple pie, and it too was ready to serve its final purpose and be damned.

Who Buy Tickets To The Resurrection

I would like another war, another chance to blow the liquid life from transport trucks and brown paper people, one more war of rot and attrition, with world as my witness, no constraints, become a scorched shell again like we lived our younger years when we drowned our fear in recklessness and illuminated our loss

of virginity with candles for the fallen, sent their coffins to the papers for publication, their ghosts above the fold, their toll and toil in a mist of vaporized futures above the hills and the other side measured for pits in fire bombed places while clocks ticked down fatal hours, beat us stiff with bloodied arms, forced us to force our private child who suffered  a familiar loss to kneel his final day in the dirt, but what if he was afraid or sacred, we never asked, in the love of life if you’re white, your bleeding heart exposed to the sun, an accident

of birth, but please don’t run from me, please don’t run from me, I’m just like you only taller, I’m just like you when you put your hands in the air, shuffle your feet, call your gods from hiding as I envy your cyanide liberty, knowing we can travel to Wyoming in dead of winter with four wheel drive, six foot high tires because of you, because of how we learned to hate, and how we learned to take the hate upon our hands and fingers, rub its taste on our tongue, in breathless awe, to free the hard plastic minds of lesser souls with tender explosions, to pay for our mistakes and pray from decks of armored ships, brandish our purified banners to show

an enemy better manners as I inside your house of forgiveness crumble within myself, despise myself, and from the rubble rise to scratch faces in the stone, and how I am to blame for my actions, my desire, because it’s not enough to turn the other cheek when evil pronounces its intentions, we must listen for counterfeit sound, mortar rounds made of sin to rip open next of kin who buy tickets to the resurrection, with silence in trees, a ray of sun through the leaves, one last warble as bird folds his wings before the red fog parts, in a time of misplaced retribution and historical blunders that, as gentle noted horns, float down on melodic destruction from the mountain.