Pepper Proud on a Distilled Walkway
Stolen strings from the circus of David’s ceremonial dance bricks
Somber tones for her fingers like gin on the saber-rattling water
Her voice drifting between highways where you shared a coke can
With your father to pee in, lasting longer for the drive, for the sky
Dancing too eloquent for your heart to be strong enough to distance
Your own feelings from your illustrated parade, now awake and sober
Departure from reflections, impregnate the dancing forest, itching
Mental distress in prurient ink model printers in the rivers of technology
Shop centers like quaking centers for her trust, Pepper Proud does not
Notice the driftwood pausing solute dressing between the aisles
In matrimony and stockable notes from Russian composers lost
Today between the Tonton Macoute drills in the sand and oil roads
An undergrowth in her sight hidden in the forests of formation
More a dream than a tunnel of perception, a failure of conception,
A borrowed illumination for hyperspace and gold offered beneath
Your lamb for solitary stations of relentless wealth and poor home
Perineurium apologies so hard won they required a bribe, central
And sacred for all metered out feeding and folding upon the heart,
Pepper does not listen to you when you have open eyes in the ceiling
Like broken strings on a water instrument in the light of sunken cars
On a highway of gold dust and singled out persuasions that left us
Long ago, now departing laundry tales like cigarettes given to us
By Jimmy Carter, always a soldier, always a drinker, now in the skies
Of whiskey dreams forever now, in the afterlife of anger humbled