© Rock Salt Plum, 2003-2005. All Rights Reserved. Copying, digital retrieval, or transfer in any form (other than for personal reading or viewing), is strictly prohibited unless authorized.
Watching the Weatherman with the Sound Turned Down
I feel like a deaf man
watching a budding dictator
explain how he plans to conquer
the Boston metro area,
then work his way out
to the rest of Massachusetts,
eventually taking over
the silly little rectangles
of Rhode Island and Connecticut,
before using his stick to beat
the rest of the country
into submission, leaving bruises
shaped like squiggles and triangles
all over the landscape.
It's so easy to lose myself
in his story that I almost never hear
what you are saying
about how he looks like
he is playing air guitar
over New England
or conducting the choir
at the Low Front School for the Mute.
Tripp Howell
Tripp Howell lives and writes in Shelby, North Carolina, and has a B.A. in English from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His work has appeared recently in Main Street Rag, Iodine, vs., and Poems Niederngasse.
You have to be always drunk. . . so as not to feel the horrible burden of time that breaks your back and bends you to the earth, you have to be continually drunk. But on what? Wine, poetry or virtue, as you wish. But be drunk.
- Baudelaire
