detective poem

sorry it took so long – I actually abandoned what I was writing in favor of this, since the previous effort was seriously going nowhere. I tried to incorporate the elements that make det. fiction work for me into a poem (unreality, sense of forboding, etc.) but don’t know how well it works. Let me know what you think. I will be back on later to comment on everyone else’s work – I’m looking forward to reading, and am extremely happy that more and more people are joining in. As long as the voices aren’t just in my head, the doctor says I will be okay.

_C

            Stolen Dreams by: C. Brannon Watts

 

You told me about it, awake

but whose children are these?

whose children

            standing alone

            fish-grouped in a scene from a market stall

            outside the hotel where

they found the body

they being you

and some amalgam of me + your

sister

 

the hotel was empty but for us

walking outside

we could see the flood waters a mile away

smell the reeds and mud

            one hundred feet to the body bag

            one hundred feet to an abandoned someone

no tags             no coroner’s logo

re-elections are lost this way,

I remember saying

 

and we opened it,

there on the sidewalk

under an autumn sun that could have cared less

blithely strewing cancer and barbecues alike

with fat golden laces;

the whips of indifference

 

the children watched from across the street

no longer important to the vignette

faded and insubstantial as the garbage near their Chuck Taylor’s

losing permanence as the sun went down

 

the body?

it almost doesn’t matter.

The form was androgynous

black, with graying hair in a jerry curl,

unformed breasts, and two lateral cuts above the navel

male? female? some amalgam like me/your sister, here, in this place

that is no place

 

we had no ideas – there were no police

and in the logic of dreams, we didn’t think to call

so instead, we took the body with us,

curiously without odor, washed out like the children

like an object found in an attic

a dried flower arrangement

or some hand-carved cameo of the unknown

and showed your father,

the voice and warrant of wisdom in these

halls of power

these halls with no walls

echoed his words:

I don’t want to see that. Call the police.

 

from there, of course, no vision, stolen dream that it is.