Poetry of Issue #7        Page 33

SACRIFICE
'  the little goats dance before the slaughter'
   after Graciela Iturbide

men of carbon, men of flame, old men
all of them, lived fast enough for some
and too slow for others, fast in the slow
lane slow in the fast, now they sit in their
pickup trucks it is morning, they're drinking
coffee, dying slow, slow on the bayou, the
company knew how to manage these men,
their wives knew how to manage them too,
how to keep a foot on a man's neck like a
gas pedal, keep his engine running in good
weather and foul, but they're used up now, may
as well dump used men like these into the river,
like lead, like mercury, the river is dying anyhow,
no man fool enough to pull a fish out of water
like this, it'd kill you, tho what's one more death
in a place where there's so much death -- brown
fish floating in a dead man river, old men idling
in the parking lot, floating -- a blue tortoise lumbers
across the road it'll be roadkill soon, that species
been dead a thousand years nobody bothered
to tell it, nobody can tell the old men in the bayou
anything about anything either, global warming,
species extinction, dead dreams, dead dicks,
they are slow, they are confused -- useless!
they are lost in their blind shells, at least the
company knows what it is about and companies
are people too, in this century they are, ain't they,
with dreams and appetites and intentions, not like
old men, though they were intentional once -- now
they're just old, not worth fattening up for flames,
they have had their day, now their day is done.

  George Wallace