It's just poetry, it won't bite

Saturday Afternoon Hero


08.03.19 Posted in today's words by

David Reuter’s most recent poem to appear here was “Contrail” (June 2019).

Saturday Afternoon Hero
By David Reuter

The lines stood menacing, without hoods,
preferring painted helmets
to shroud their darkened heads.
Before the brutal roar, I heard
the rustle and smack of padded frames,
rats on a shredded canvas.
They loped in droning motions,
this way and that.
Portentous forms flowed over
the languid, line-sprayed field.
The air was thick with battered bones
that played a lifeless jig.
Somewhere, a sluggish band
sprayed the dazed bystanders
with flattened phrases and dirgelike tunes.

At once, a single man
escaped the mangled wad of sodded bodies,
flying forth on winged feet.
They stretched with their spider fingers out before
his fevered whirring path without a grasp.
The blazing man with pigskin in hand
hurled forth from the shadowed haunting pack
that followed in his wake.
The scrum fell dumb before the whirl
of crazy legs lifting past
and the shadows of the churlish world
stood still at the length of an impotent arm.

The impudent horns defied
the raw autumn afternoon. It was
cowed for just a moment,
arrested in the leaden, smoky air
that couldn’t hold it prisoner,
until the chill came back to me on a
bitter, wicked draft.
I hunkered back into myself and waited
in case another hasty jailbreak came to pass.



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