Birthright

Born in the congested slew draining
from a first world
the quick brown eddy chasing its
lazy tail in loop'd'loops
my bare feet mingling in the cold clay
where skeletons like mine are buried
where history is stamped and filed
screams of an angry egret tossing
curses over its shoulder as it lifts
the gliding lofty grace such big birds have
escaping the dark purple pregnant
belly of a towering thundercloud
swollen with a baptism in her womb

she comes on the stiff breeze an apprehension
a fear that reminds mankind that this world is
not his, but her's
while I crawl in muddy puddles among
catfish eggs and beer cans she marches across
the landscape on legs of white lightning
bending the cattails
sending the trampoline into the neighbor's yard

I am slick with afterbirth
coughing up filthy river water trying to
breathe my first mouthful of a hot summer afternoon
the sweet taste of stale cigarettes
a belching chemical column at the plastics plant
Man attempts foolhardy dominion over
all things great and small

birthright of this baby boy
is sin and salvation from it
circumcise me bent with a rusty fish hook
put a golden pencil in my hand
or a spear
or a cell phone
until I can hunt for myself in the tall sugarcane
behind the levee and toxic bar pits swollen
I will not return home
where with a case of Miller Lite and ecstasy
a man with a heavy beard and sweat-stained cowboy hat
I was born.

TA