Cigarette Burn Blues Poem by Martin Lochner

a boy was caught
for stealing
a cake of sunlight soap
no more a buckets height
alley eyed and wild for the judgment
observing satan index finger
printed in his skinny neck

I enquired who did this to you!
life and Pontius Pilates sir

leading him to the cells
he sang with canary passion
a ghetto spiritual litigating my conscience
as another wasted child enters my doom

my Lord my Lord have mercy on us!
the little boy found dead in my cell

flutter with tatty wings
little one
when hand me down
angels come to collect you
God will find in his spacious segregated
heart a place for you to play