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Found Photo, "The Garden of Earthly Delights" in the Background
The talk here is
not of Spain
nor of the Civil
War
Not of Picasso
bleeding,
a failing century's
grief
but of the harm
men do to other
men
the held-breath
silence of just-
before-the-end
The Crime Scene
after Stan Rice
All the faces in the ill-lit street
are wearing masks like equity
actors off-stage in guerilla theater,
a stranegeinterlude with police cars,
emergency flashers, real murder
weapons and riddled bodies
emboldened by death, their heads
covered by rags, a black plague
mask for disease prevention in
a rat-infested tin pan alley awaiting
a visitation of wisemen from another
incomplete vision drawn with white
chalk and defined by yellow caution
tapes, Caucasian chalk circles drawn
on stained concrete for filling in
the spaces with bood evidence and
severed finger prints; the muffled
hooves of a mounted police cordon
nearby indicate the pale horses,
pale riders, have arrived.
Alan Catlin has published dozens of chapbooks and full length books.
His latest chapbook is Our Lady of the Shipwrecks from Finishing Line Press and his selected poems
Drunk and Disorderly from Pavement Saw. He is hard at work on his fictional memoirs
and a series of "self portrait" poems.
Email: Alan Catlin
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