Stranger with left hand offerings, how artless is the craft
Of a crack-shot without target, and a bloody autograph
Crude barrels loaded in Iraq bled your drilled heart barren
Where smoke spilled and hawks circled wrecks of fresh-killed carrion
Death in your throat, you returned, drafting a teen-aged conscription
Sword for scythe, cross for crescent -- but to hell with religion
You knew any praiseworthy God would damn your rationale
Yet drew the hawks home to roost in our nation’s capital
Bottles, sponges, Vaseline, ring doctor’s jar of leaches
Your eye fixed on vitality, your roundhouse always reaches
Death card joker, ace up your sleeve, you phantom jabbed, you lurched
Then tore off gigglistening to broadcasts of the search

Giddy newsmen leaked their scruples, like potty-trainees in church
Daring you to be more brazen when picking your next perch
Armful of slippery steel, you leapt the deep black pocket
Furies flamed out your metal mouth, smoke bent out your socket
Copper coins blinked, cheap wishes, flipped careless in the fountain
Arcs ran red, clouded pool, you’d uncapped your aching mountain
Sharp-tongued chameleons, blending like a cancerous blight --
Like a boil above sleeping Pompeii... a pimple on prom night
Were you the item unpaid for, as they tripped, choked, and gagged
Crushed like over-ripe tomatoes fallen through wet brown bags?
You pulled, cocked, you changed the weather, you checkout out of change
You rang items for the bag boys, you registered your range
You took the Tasker schoolboy to task -- for being thirteen? --
Or didn’t you ask? Perhaps through your scope you couldn’t see
A belly as bulletproof as a sane conscience should be

High noon in some restroom mirror, calibrating crosshairs,
Your greed-sick foe standing there, a pietistic butcher
The fire gone to ash in your eyes, the answer was to snuff
The soul glow in other orbs that still burned bright enough
Ghostly spot you won’t out from the mother’s raw-scrubbed hand
You divorced men from wives, chipped diamonds from their bands
Final grain of footless sand, you slipped the sheer glass slope
You smashed an hourglass figure, shattered the home-builders’ hopes
You patterned the coroner’s smock, where he wiped clean the blade
Wheelbarrow beside needy chickens, look at what you’ve made
You’ve shushed your eyes, made truth of lies, gunned the lamb for your feast
Then let your muzzle nose the breast of Wednesday’s ritual beast
And with the crime scene sanitized, and all hosed down the drain
Somehow, though begged to leave nicely, you grinned red and remained
Wolfish fiend, you found cover on our pedestrian blocks
As your hands, with measured ugliness, cuffed those of foreign clocks

Always stopped a punch too late, you scissor-hand of palsied Fate,
You locked doors of a blind date, with need for fuel as your bait
You called yourself God, but are at best a blasphemous fake.
Who needs fishing tips from Jesus to angle a drained lake?
You average paparazzi with your snapshot still lives
You happy supremacist nazi, blowing apart bee hives
Fame… money -- it’s all good honey -- but for you, bittersweet,
Who’d cap a cobbler for shoes, wanting brains to warm your feet.
Mind blowing, but hardly so, that a marksman trying his luck
Would when caught outside carnival grounds, claim to be a duck.
With all your backwards success, to me you still seem too dumb
To’ve left in your wake so much print to darken our thoughts and thumbs.
If I could, I’d edit your sentence -- keep you from the grave --
This world has enough deities(?) who’d sooner kill than save

Cool head of the perfect match, who rubbed you the wrong way?
You’ve detonated a demon’s dance; you’ve suffocated our days
Were your means borrowed of rivals, or your own meaner claim?
Were you sentencer turned criminal, or recluse lost to win fame?
Blunt, persistent, nosing the skin, your head wormed through the hide
To part the sea of your exile, to make the other side
You’re a parrot’s ruffled feathers, a baboon’s painted ass
You’re the light on the dashboard, a death machine out of gas
Posthumous Red, not read in time, left open by the bed
You prayer book neatly folded in the stiff arms of the dead
You’ve whittled the world to your essence, stripped the green bark back
You found yourself superfluous, and pared till all was black