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Board Administrator Username: mjm Post Number: 3277 Registered: 11-1998 |
Poem of the Week Jim Doss is Dead Jim Doss 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. |
