Lorman

This next week or so will find me posting multiple poems inspired by a two month road trip undertaken earlier this summer by a friend and I. I'll throw a new one up everyday, so try to keep up. The series is called "The Open Road 2010: Burning" - the name of which you'll start to understand, precious reader, as you gander each new poetic entry. They are inspired separately by the differing locales we visited and in some odd way tells the tale of our time spent there. Anyway, enjoy. We start the series off in Mississippi...

Lorman is burning,
a lost culture overtaken by wild magnolias,
creamy vaginal orbs dangling promiscuously from those roadside trees,
wet box turtle slipping on the black top,
that deep cut of the Natchez Trace,
antique vein that winds its way up through the Mississippi Delta,
a faded tattoo crawling like cancer up an old black man’s arm,
lost music,
forgotten town,
an old country store riddled with unsold trinkets,
aged lamps and outdated toasters no buyer would ever consider,
no purchase ever necessary,

The flames rise like the open cleft of the heaven’s above,
a deluge of soft grey rain,
ceaseless toil of sweating clouds
     causing everything to stink as if we’re driving through the armpit of the South,
the Mississippi River Valley,
where cannon balls still cling to the church steeples,
where bygone era cotton mansions are only marked by the Corinthian columns
    that still stand but no longer guard any sweeping front porch,
just an oversized concrete cage in the forest,

Dust on the old hymnals,
hornets in the pulpit,
cracked stained glass,
the fractured and crackled golden brown landscape of deep fried Lorman chicken,
bright white breasts and muted silver thighs,
dripping in the juices of a thousand cooked meals past,
busty birds sentenced to death,
to be reborn in the holy masticating waters of satiating saliva,
ground into energy,
cleaned of their brittle bones and released of their earthly cares,
from the Delta’s doleful Blues those chicks were born,
and back to those same singsong, soul-sister Blues they return,
ashes to ashes,
mud to mud.

7.10