Prick of the Spindle: Poetry: Love: In Selma

In Selma
By Sloan Love

Papermill skunksmoke envelopes this town that Time has only barely just remembered
Only just taken the time to carve the cracks into the faces of the millworkers,
Who labor and struggle along the banks of the black river where old bullets
still kill Yankee soldiers in watery graves.
     Who still eternal Rise.
And in the year when God or god or Jehoover forgot this place,
and the water flowed through the streets;
A thousand old cotton plantations mausoleums for the ghosts who refuse to die
and only sire the sons of mock aristocracy who learn early that there are three
things in this Life:
      1. Money.
      2. Pleasure.
      3. Darkness.
So that a man will struggle his entire life for the first one (Money.)
To get just a little of the other two (Pleasure. Darkness.)
So that they grow old and toothless inside deerstands or Budweiser Bars.
So that a bewildered traveler may ask, “Why Selma? Why do they live there?”
                                                                                          Or even
                                                                              “Why do they live at all?”
Only to inhale with each protoplasmic breath: “Remember When?”
and only to exhale: “By god we done it!”

So the organism becomes an un-organism,
A no-man.
And shrinks into ghosthood of the ghost population of Selma, Lord Selma.
And somewhere a second-rate immortal balls his fist and curses,
                                                                “This is not my fault!”
                                                                         pleads,
                                                                “Aint none of this my fault….”

Sloan Love is a former vagrant and hobo whose work has appeared in poetry anthologies and on bar napkins. He writes fiction and poetry with the hopes of entertaining and providing a little bit of sanctuary from the stresses and chaos of the modern world. He recently completed his first novel, and is shopping it around. These days he has a warm bed and heater, which unfortunately provides him all too much time to ponder "The mysteries of the universe" which are most confusing to him. He hopes to live at least as long as his dog.