Tinder dry days

Tinder dry days

Bone hard summers

Fighting for life

In the heat haze

Walking in rubber-soled shoes

So hot they stick

To the asphalt

Which moves underfoot

Swampland blacktop

Sundown blinkers

Bar the window

Keeping the flies out

Because they never find

Another way

Even with the window wide

A dizzy bee staggers

Across the tree line

Looking for clover

Finding none

Lazy boys

Slick with grease

Lounging in the garden

Skewed drunken

Tables with broken legs

Piled against a wall

Kindlewood

In a lightning strike

Windless farms

Lie as still as a painting

Of a catastrophe

People make money

Relating this stuff

Lifeless fields

Browned in the dirt

Even the sweat

On my forehead

Runs dry

Maybe it will rain

Before I die

I will commemorate

The event

In a poem

Written in the blood

Of a farm boy’s hands

Blistered from a plough

The tractor died

Before the horse

It had a bigger heart

It burst

Like the sky

When the clouds disappeared

Into a black hole

Sucked the whole world dry

Nothing good ever came

Of hope

Just the pain of repetition

Which is a definition

Of madness

The memory

Of a raincloud

Is hard to picture

But the smell of failure

Turns in the stomach

Death is a release

There is no drought

In heaven

So the Preacher says

Every night he prays

Does a little rain dance

Ma’ moves slowly

Like she is in a trance

And Pa made a pact with the Devil

Down by the crossroads

At midnight

Gave old man Perkins

A hell of a fright

Now the guy is possessed

Pa says it’s some kind of test

But that is bullshit

Everything is

As it is

And will be

Until the rains come

And then some.