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Tales from X-Husbandland XX read by Josh Kight.
Tales from Ex-Husband land XX
The Old Submariner
(Cries from the Throat)
It is ended now
The pocked packets
Of rage in every other house
On my street.
The Cries from the throat
Of the drunk submariner
Could be heard for blocks
His brain was inside out
Showing raw meat rage
No one knows what three years
Under the ocean
Seconds from a claustrophobic death
Did to him.
But he choked his Cherokee wife
He beat his Cherokee Irish kids
And he sowed chaos and fear
For miles lolling on the passing stripes
Of little neck road.
Driving a smoking Rambler
Jabbing that push button transmission
Hr drooled out obscene jokes
From nineteen forty four.
Once he appeared
Like a boulder of cottonmouth fear
Simmered in a vodka sauce
To take his sons and I
In fearful silence to the junkyard
We explored the bent bumpers
And pulverized paper labels
Like a Treasure Island.
When we looked up, he was back in the Rambler
Head back muttering in his blindness
At those twenty year cracking hulls
And popping rivets that still seemed to own him.
Joshua Kight 1/15/07