By: Johnny Cate
jet wreck
shattered is the cathedral peace
when seizuring
the cylinder
sets her pressure free
and the scattershot dove
gives up a wing,
starts spiraling
through the clouds
lip-locked now
with her angry exes—
scorned gravity restating
his dysfunctional claim
as disaster's cloacal kiss
bears fruit
in this bird's metal body
engenders doom, reproduces
dropping oxygen masks
like inverted box-jacks
one last bad joke
for us all to take home
down we go, down
we go
with a sonic cocktail of prayers
curses, a cabin song
of heaven-bound hellfire
of elegant tragedy
doing what raindrops do,
and doing it to death
we'll leave a black gash
in the earth
malfunction's offspring
rebirthed on impact
a hydrodistillation of souls
steamed by fire
and rising, free
of the body's weaknesses
a split-second stopping
to admire
the gracile new frames
we were afraid to embrace
the refracting energies
that made themselves
known in brief fits
of light while living
now extracted from the flesh
by the jet wreck
and gleaming
giving of themselves
wholly, without fear
or mortal reserve
the murder of lilly kane
good stories
start with dead girls—
we're suckers for it,
cop sheet reads homicide
and by the time
the coroner comes
we're all tore up
for this new
princess of never.
It always helps
if she's hot
to qualify the grief
and she was so beautiful
we say, what a shame
to see her ambrosial hair
so tangled,
her brains
on the pavement.
Totally bingeable though,
this intrigue
in which sweet men
are now suspect
and those closest
called to testify.
even we intimate
are mysteries—
each and all to each
each and all to each
aware of only our own
glitched pianissimos and
capacity for murder,
alone and in secret
craving a veronica
to find us out,
craving to be cracked
and known, motives
laid bare and
broadcast on
television
lynch-mob
*in 1906, a lynch-mob dragged an innocent black man named Ed Johnson from a jail cell in Chattanooga, TN. Johnson had been wrongfully accused of raping a white woman. The Supreme Court issued a stay of execution, and during that stay, the mob came and hung him on the Walnut St. Bridge. His last words were "God bless you all, I am a innocent man..." This one's for my man ED JOHNSON
And I saw as it were
the open mouths—
the rotten teeth and tongues
spastic as a shock
sent through a worm
halitosis of whiskey
and piss and putrid spit
gutters sweat-boarded
gulping terrified
gagging their iron throats
beneath the many-footed
beast, the centipede
demon crawling
toward the jailhouse
yank that blackboy out
break the lock
kill the fucking sheriff
if he so much as speaks
against us—
this boy gonna swing
one way no ways
we will have our justice
they place
their hands on the man
soot-stained flagella
flailing out, fingers
tiny tentacles from this
devil's anemone
what is innocence here?
a myth to this creature
this riot's true enemy
for all have sinned
all have fallen short
of the glory of god and
these gallows will be
denied no longer
see now the blameless
one, slave son
blessing that abomination
praying grace for
the stinking, stinking flood
of flesh that whelms him
lifts him on a wave
and like thread
sends his head
through the noose's eye
weightless ascends
his silhouette dark
against a sky of fire
white women screaming
now no this isn't
what they wanted no
he's innocent he's innocent
but too late his angelic
swaying, too late
the bullets from below
50 revolver balls, a lobbed
hail of curses, crocodiles
snapping ravenous
at the dangled man
as his blood evacuates
and flowing, falling
incarnadines the mob
splashes sanguine
on the saved rapist's face
until a gunshot
cuts the rope, and a cop
chops a finger off
the felled body, blasts
three more holes
in the baptized skull
to safekeep death
and punctuate the act.
then comes exhale, dizzy
high violence and
post-blow sloth
as the legion fractures
and factions of drunken
killjoys go stumbling back
from whence they came
all murder-keen and
sentimental, confirmed
each to his core
justice has been done.
through the bastard silence
black magdalenes
in peace approach
the corpse—poor boy,
poor sweet innocent boy
we'll take you
somewhere safe
lay you in a garden
of hyperfine flowers
a shade some place
they'll never care to look
they'll never
surround you again not even
to ask forgiveness
and I saw as it were
in white dresses
these night-skinned girls
carrying cerements
kissing his gelid lips
and by their hearts
making him to hover
and lie in a soil bed
on the side of a hill
in his lilac necktie
you'll be forgotten just
a little while, love
a century you'll sleep alone
before they speak
your name
before they're ready
to face the still smoldering
hate-blaze and smell
the still stink air that
lingers in the pit of the bridge
they hung you on
sleep baby sleep
and perhaps if you
have your way
you'll meet a few of your
murderers in the pearl
bosom, the space
where sin is wiped away
and every last frenzy
is shipwrecked as a wicked
frigate upon the
breakers of heaven
and never a lynch-mob
licks its lips
and combs the cells
calling calling calling
for a heart to stop
Johnny is a poet living in Chattanooga, TN.
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