A week or so ago, I mentioned that I was working on one of the poem prompts that Robert Lee Brewer had set up on Poetic Asides, and that I might post it when I was done with it. Well, I can’t say I think it’s one of my best, but I’m as done with it as I’m going to get for the moment. Any suggestions?

Headlines

I was born two days after Nixon won
the first time. Inauspicious beginnings
in a year of strife. Bobby Kennedy.
Martin Luther King, Jr. The Tet Offensive.
I am the same age as The ODB
and Lisa Marie Presley, as Ziggy Marley
and Vanilla Ice, and no wonder
we’re all fucked up because we
all came forth in a year of strife
and we’ve never gotten over it.
But I refuse to stay down. In ‘68
I also got Tommie Smith and John Carlos
in Mexico City, The White Album,
Cash at Folsom Prison and Lady Soul,
Of Being Numerous and North Central,
2001: A Space Odyssey and Planet of the Apes
and “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?”.
It’s not enough, but it is something,
a firebreak, a seawall that deadens
the hurricane’s storm surge, a shot
of whiskey to numb an abscessed tooth.

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Published by Brian

I'm Senior Poetry Editor of The Rumpus, as well as a published poet. My first book, A Witness in Exile was published in 2011 by Louisiana Literature Press.

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