ORDER OF EVENTS

First, he taught us to use the dead as shawls

in the viscous winter escorting his arrival.

Next, he taught us to forget the dead

were dead, our dead, and dead because of a wager

we did not consent him to make with the thin-lipped

savior of his own pantomime. Third, he delivered

on promises that blew off the tops of homes

in places whose names he could not pronounce.

Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown

forced to fit a quiet country needing nothing

from a crown. Where once was honey unhived

competition. The drones meant for war

prepared for war. We dusted our shoulders

of Shadows’ silent reconnaissance, surveilled

as practice for a massacre we did not consent to.

The royal parade pride’s malady stomped

its sequence through beat drums of human skin

from which emanated a rhythm impossible

to decipher. I too would shake my ass

to the sound of stars falling night-

wise into a pit of myth-bent nomenclature

if the names sounded like home. Under eroding

circumstances, this kingdom could become home.

Under eroding circumstances, my gasp

has become home enough, love not

consented to yet detected from beneath

my mindless right hand pressing its devotion

to ritual over my heart, flag above waving heaven

and blood into the smoke-diffused sky I

quake my way through anthems beneath. Rockets

glaring off my breath forced to evidence I belong.

The crown is crooked. We straighten it

with vote-vapid hands. The crown sits too heavy

for the king to carry on his own. When it falls,

“O say can you see” strikes its inquisition.

My knees, summoned to straighten at the hinges

permission most questionably opens from,

spike the earth with a kiss. Could I

kneel my way to revolution?

Would that goad the king to unzip?

Final Poem for a King