Brother Damien

they shot you
in color
& in black & white
in digital video
& in Super 8
but they only caught the tanned hide of your epidermis  
not what was inside your head or your heart
while all around you
a cavalcade of ancient queens lusted
& lost their cool over you

no one ever gave you what you deserved
those that got closest to you
had scar tissue where their hearts used to be
no guts? – I think not
it’s just that the public school & the U.S. Penal System
got to you before you got a chance to get into your self

but you’re okay;it’s okay
to drop out of a society that didn’t want you anyway
to hang out at decrepit homes,dives & dumps
tag along,wearing once white,now filthy tee shirt
peering out at it all
as the cream of the Great American Dream drips down
the leg of your tattered jeans into the newly littered gutters
of now squalid suburbia

I don’t expect you to understand this rank panegyric
anymore than you understood when
you were asked to move out of the basement
where you slept amid the abandoned toys & wet laundry
of your sister’s kids
they who kept you awake galloping upstairs at 2 in the afternoon
as you covered your head in psyche withdrawl

so you moved & sought refuge
in the prefab,pseudo-country club apartment complex of
“young singles” (not to be confused with “sliced singles”,
rooming with that insidious shaman turned awful entrepreneur
who used your sweat( & blood)over late night kitchen oven
to make his dough rise, to get his pizza business off the ground

what kind of ex post facto Naval court martial sentenced you to that?

all the jobs you’ve done!
all the jobs done on you…
I remember picking you up from work many times
after a day at one of those grimy,tortuous factory slimes,
you standing,waiting at the curb, beat
looking like a perforated Fearless Fosdick after a gunfight
holes of soot & pain,shredded & wet with perspiration
fried with desperation
a couple of years later in the sun
laying asphalt on perverse parking lots of banks & fast food chains
barbecued you were

what a waste,
when your imagination & spirit should burn in factories of mirth
& on assembly lines of celebration
instead of being squashed & flattened with the weight of minimum wage