poem12 Mar 2012 05:47 pm

The laying of hands over a warm cup
of capuccino won’t deliver us
from what can be read in this morning’s Sun.

For years our dailies failed to penetrate
even a pulpified body of text
with action verbs and barbed, insightful nouns.

I asked if this wasn’t unusual
and my editor said, “Messenger-gods,
like cloistered monks, can always make amends.”

White lies stain my fingers in the obits
with gilt on paper — photographs, captions,
illuminations cut from the whole cloth,

bound for the cheapest of rags or tabloids
to ward off Times more tasteful than our own.

WC Roberts lives in a mobile home up on Bixby Hill, on land that was once the county dump. The only window looks out on a ragged scarecrow standing in a field of straw and dressed in his own discarded clothes. WC dreams of the desert, of finally getting his first television set, and of ravens. Above all, he writes.

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