Although I haven’t asked, the repairman tells me while returning his tools to the toolbox that he has a titanium plate in his head. The language we rely on for communication is always jumping its banks and carving its own twisty path. It’s why Rimbaud sighed in his lover Paul Verlaine’s ear that sometimes he just wanted to be a beggar in Africa. What jobs society inflicts on its poets! Mail carrier, drug dealer, hack journalist. And yet creative if doomed acts of rebellion occur daily. The red juice of roses, for instance, runs down my chin.



Howie Good is the author of more than two dozen poetry collections, including most recently The Death Row Shuffle (Finishing Line Press), The Trouble with Being Born (Ethel Micro Press), and Gunmetal Sky (Thirty West Publishing).