The Deed Poem by Alan Reed

The iciness of his smile
seeped like osmosis through the crevices
left on my face by the squint rooted
on fires of a loud and angry sun.

A tempest stormed across the dusty, red sky
following the wake of his Packard of no color.

His eyes with their misted askant look
found us like the rain
and the dark clouds took cover.

Unowned feathers fled the frightened fields
like tumbleweeds amid superior dusts of sleep
wielding easily the pale club of the wind
and swirling the soul of a flower strike.

- an utter-able chill -

Where lurched the deeds of green thrilling light
with thinned new fragile yellows?
Spoiled and stale like the scant and stunted ears of corn
not able to sprinkle the acres
that had fallen into battlefields.

Picket's Charge in woods that stuttered and clapper-clawed
songs that stirred the few scrawny birds that stayed on.

Sharecroppers in the Dust Bowl
walked on loose strands of primitive tightropes.

One could hear the blast across the Great Plains
all the way to Boise City.
Blood oozed from the side of my palate,
decadal fertilizer at long last leaching the dry ground.

As I lay dying -
he reached toward the heavens - swanking the deed
and cackling like a hexed slime eel.