excerpt from "Lynching from Lamposts"

"I frequently sit under this broken lamppost on my street...

...A sucker for poets, I once heard a poet describe the moon like a locket hanging between two palm trees. Whose neck with the locket? I could have loved that poet I think were it not for his poetry. So, I think of lynching and how awful it is, and how I found a photo in a heap of trash in an alley of a man being fake lynched as part of rodeo parade in the street. It’s 1959 in the picture. He hangs- he has a mustache- from a rope with the crowd all around him. The crowd has a mouth that’s agape. They’re dressed naively, what you’d expect in 1959. And the caption reads, “Lynching from Lampposts.” (I’ve got the picture in my pocket to show him if he passes). Ah, but no matter what time vacuum has separated us, no matter the wattage that has sucked that memory clean, where now a space exists to be appalled by the way they used their lampposts then. It’s been 1959 to present; and I am not so naively dressed. They loved their street as much as I love mine: the spectacle whir of lampposts, what you can hang from lampposts: a pair of sneakers, staples, nails, a man. But when they stood under the spectacle they saw a strung neck where I see a locket without a neck. "