Ashes on the Pavement
I wrote unfriendly things on diner napkins, left them where delusionists might find them.
The waitress asked if I wanted cream, but her voice cracked like morning ice.
On the TV, a senator blinked slow, mouthing rage that did not match the script.
I sipped the coffee, bitter as headlines, and stared at my reflection in the spoon.
Truth is, I hoped someone would read it and feel their throat tighten.
Truly cruel, I admit it, but only because polite lies never got us anywhere.
The preacher barked through the speaker grille, soaked in sweat and certainty.
He said morality was under siege by misfits, poets, and lesbians with blue hair.
I lit a cigar in the church parking lot, thinking of the First Amendment.
The ash fell in the shape of a question mark, and I stepped on it.
I made degenerate art for the religious right, mailed it without a return address.
A cross burned on a front lawn, lit by the duped, those believing bigotry is tradition in disguise.
My brush did not tremble, but the canvas curled at the edges like old skin.
They called it disgusting, un-American, quietly bought, and overpaid for every last piece.
Money always finds a way to scrub its hands clean in the baptismal font.
I put it off again, the reckoning, the interview, the handshake with regret.
Instead I walked past boarded windows and counted every bolt on the riot van.
Someone shouted “freedom” through a bullhorn held together with duct tape.
I did not look back, only forward, into the dark that does not beg or explain.
Conviction is a lonely streetlight blinking red at a town that stopped listening.