Errands

By Philip Byron Oakes

Blood slush funds spilling preventable oxygen
on Saturday's swath they quiescently leave to
tour lush wooden neighborhoods where eight
of nine lives are lived in sequestered providence
of grievous shortcomings grown laudable
shoulders on the sticky ilk of day somehow
cheapened by smudgeproof windows or not she
stood her ground in the diary of a mothball with
a semi-colon in her soup stirring soap for dirty
bellies embellished by lemon where limes are
blue in the storyteller's drawl you hear when
little if anything is ever heard of the combustible
shadows shedding human ashes to ashes as
reason why good people suffer the seared
horseflesh of a compromise from the crosswalks
between the here of your right foot and the now
of the Fuller Brush man at the door of the
charnel house of five cent glimpses at the
golden ring me any time you see my hands are
free to squander the time it takes to breathe   .

 

 

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