A languid woman shines winter smooth, lying smeared
with sleep, crushed under lakes of shadow, mists of
light.
He haunts the naked dawn, a hunter in a blind, bent
under a cold, blue eternity. He never wanted to be
a good little boy. Not John. Not for a minute. Still,
sometimes, in a lather of regret, he wishes he were
again
the grocer’s son, the boy behind the counter taking
coins,
rapt in dreams of pink, panting goddesses, drooling
sordid
honey of desire. A bag of soft coal deflected his life’s
journey. His father raged, rebuked. He took to taking
things:
money, cars. A prisoner, he learned the tricks of robbing
banks, lived wild and easy, spilled life fluids. He
worshiped
beauty, kissed bare breasts, tongued most flowers of
rapture,
and when, one day, he took a bullet in the neck in an
alley
by the Biograph, women soaked handkerchiefs in his blood
and lined up for hours to gawk at his stiffened corpse.
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Peter Benson teaches African literature, American
literature, and writing full time at a university in
Teaneck, New Jersey. He lived and taught previously
in Sierra Leone, Kenya, and Senegal, and was recipient
of a Rockefeller Foundation Visiting Research Fellowship
and two Fulbright Fellowships. His book on African writers
and intellectuals in the 1960s was published by the
University of California Press
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