Desperate For Such a Charge

Fresh from the cavernous salt domes
that wend their way beneath the Gulf of Mexico,
my return is delayed.

I am, in fact, in jail,
falsely accused, falsely arrested.
Anger wells like bubbling magma,
justice is a toothless cog in the essential machinery
of right and wrong.

Loose fitting now in orange awaiting-wear,
the must-laden mattress pleading trial,
shadows of iron bars
elongate on green-checkered linoleum.

The interstate was banality and breeze, at first.
Yet erelong, a Highway Patrol cruiser chose
to imprecate my smooth passage,
stilling my joyous momentum,
jousting with sunlight, those red and blue oscillations.

Such routine traffic stops weigh like lumps
on the acne-free complexion of the workaday,
becoming, at times, undue deformities,
made so by fate, by the overzealous,
or even by, perhaps, unseen gods.

Three cartons of salt can hardly be called bounty,
nor contraband, nor the profit
of some ill-gotten gain
seized upon
by any overlord, yet that,
along with two batteries, two Diehards
purchased at Sears, was sufficient for the man.

Now, having just been advised
by this tight-suited public defender
so magnanimously arranged,
I bleed with a sort of exasperated soreness,
from both throat and gut, having with machine-honed precision
explained, until blueness harried the blush from both cheeks,
why I am not guilty of assault and battery.

36 lines