"Jim Doss is Dead"
There is very little grieving over his death.
-- The Daily Oklahoman
I died in El Reno on Vallejo’s Thursday
on a day I can already remember,
as the autumn rains dotted the Oklahoma sky
like stray derringer shots. A week ago
it was just such another Vallejo from Mexico
that I had in custody, a stump of a fellow
like his famous namesake dying of hunger,
want and lack of love, a tumbleweed
that blew over from Texas to spread his fire
across the badlands I marshal. Spain
shaped his heart and mind with the blood
of the conquistadores. The savagery of the Aztecs
breathed in his tattoos, greasy hair and skin,
the primitive slope of his forehead
that could not understand my English commands.
So I beat him with the knot-end
of a rope, with a stick I found under a Palo Verde,
and my fists pumping like the pistons of a train
until I could punch no more. The only witnesses
were the Thursdays, the bruised ribs and shoulder blades,
the loneliness, the rain, the roads of escape not taken.
Then I bought his broken-tongued silence
with a bullet in the middle of the forehead.
He pleaded on his knees in words as foreign
as the singing of crickets in cotton fields.
I don’t care what the newspapers print
about “the bad man from Bitter Creek”
who can outdraw any gun in the southwest.
I write my psalms in gunpowder and smoke,
a staccato of iambic flashes and roars
echoing in sunlight, wind and sandstone, the desert
yellows and reds that I color a little redder.
Who needs these Vallejos streaming across
the Rio Grande, their lunch pails filled
with an agony that searches for poetry,
jobs and God? It was my duty to apprehend
and enforce the law with an Old Testament
severity that even Jehovah could admire.
But my own words circled back
for revenge when a bullet ripped through
the tin lettering on my chest that read: justice served.
© 2005 Jim Doss
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