Devonte Travels the Sorry Route Poem by T. J. Anderson III

True, like I scribe to you
Devonte was a foot soldier.
Hep to the old one two
brogan banged pavement.


Downbeat long past
"feets do yo stuff."
He was the dis
mordant shuffler,
son of the penny-ante,
off-beat "love will find a way" Blakean prodigy.


Glider of man
holes and jack-ball
bottles pushed to the curb.


He was the hoofer,
the wolf boy calling cadence
to Okmulgee back
dreams and dawning days
where he Eagle Rocked
in Cimarron sludge
and ragged tails at a high school dance



After hours
Devonte pushed a rickety shopping cart
through market lanes and stone soul picnic
surrey with the frontier fringe on top.
emblematic of the colonizer's booze
grandiloquent booby prize filth
progeny of branch noose ripe tree



Legacy of a miraculous
bounty of hang nailed fingers
blood birds poaching pedigrees to
"Here I am. Now you see me, now you don't."
subject to the gaze of distant blue hated brothers
or rather a bother of continual apparition

the "me not me" rattling in the stove pipe
of his own voice rife with suffering.