POETREE

I've been away in California visiting family and had a great time. Back home, back to reality, back to wanting to escape it.

I'm actually going to share something of mine as a friend suggested it was decent (a claim I find flattering and dubious as my poetry is, as a general rule, awful and possibly not poetry). For background, I am writing a novel series that is basically a civil rights allegory via preternatural hominids. Anyhoo, I get silly sometimes and write poems from their perspectives, and this is the primary narrator, wereanimal and mass-murderer by necessity more than choice, on the day of his execution:

Rest in Peace
On the day of my execution
I asked my lawyer if I could have any say
in what color blindfold I would wear
I wanted the last thing I'd see
to be the white flag
I should have flown
for all these years.

Look - there aren't enough bullets
for a monster like me
but for once I will bare my chest
instead of my teeth
with the desperate hope that maybe
maybe
when my war drum heart stops
I will finally remember that
beating isn't the only way
to touch the world.