King Arthur
In Boy Scouts he and I were the wayward rogues
building shoddy sheet metal swords and shields
for our Monty Pythons re-enactments (What are you going to do, bleed on me?)
walking the trails at night puffing swisher sweets
and downing shit-swill unnoticed in the shadows
laughing at the absurdity of white kids dressed in war paint
and feathers, bluffing anyone with questions, uncaught.
There was that time, when, while building camp,
he decided he’d break a log in half by hurtling it
with his weightlifter’s shoulders against a tree. So he
gave it a quick yank and pressed it above his head,
let out his barbaric yawp, let fly the logs, and it snapped
unforeseen, unbroken right back at his chest and knocked
him on his invincible ass.
And camping always makes me recall that September
evening a year after his topless white suicide machine
crashed,
how Ryan the unfamiliar passenger finally told his brother and I at some campout
“I held him in my arms and he just shook, he just shook, bleeding from his ears.”
in the waning light of Indiana cornfield evening
and all those evaded consequences
finally
caught
up.
Ian S. Carter
(A poem for my poetry class. I keep revisiting this subject, but i think this is better than the older ones, (what i remember of them anyway) because it doesn't feel so overly cliched and sentimental. The promts she gave us was "something we remember losing" so wtf? why not.)
building shoddy sheet metal swords and shields
for our Monty Pythons re-enactments (What are you going to do, bleed on me?)
walking the trails at night puffing swisher sweets
and downing shit-swill unnoticed in the shadows
laughing at the absurdity of white kids dressed in war paint
and feathers, bluffing anyone with questions, uncaught.
There was that time, when, while building camp,
he decided he’d break a log in half by hurtling it
with his weightlifter’s shoulders against a tree. So he
gave it a quick yank and pressed it above his head,
let out his barbaric yawp, let fly the logs, and it snapped
unforeseen, unbroken right back at his chest and knocked
him on his invincible ass.
And camping always makes me recall that September
evening a year after his topless white suicide machine
crashed,
how Ryan the unfamiliar passenger finally told his brother and I at some campout
“I held him in my arms and he just shook, he just shook, bleeding from his ears.”
in the waning light of Indiana cornfield evening
and all those evaded consequences
finally
caught
up.
Ian S. Carter
(A poem for my poetry class. I keep revisiting this subject, but i think this is better than the older ones, (what i remember of them anyway) because it doesn't feel so overly cliched and sentimental. The promts she gave us was "something we remember losing" so wtf? why not.)