Tango [by Matthew Phillippe Michaud]
A dream awakens me to an ominous azure sky. Sumptuous clouds hop like potato sacks with invisible children in them. Then it hits me like a fist sized bee sting. Thwack! Thwack! My back numbs, my hands praise in a caught thief’s pose. Prostrated in the sky by the claws of formal reasoning. Blood runs from my wrists, hot it tastes the air, but it cools so quickly. Slowing as it blobs down to my elbows: Drip, drip. I can both think in English, French and gibberish; but, how is it that I can think black? Can I think in Japanese or Thai? I have always thought only in English and white. Yet here I am, chained to a tree. Whips slash at my back, a ground beef Jesus I imagine. A cringing slave to what? I hear the mumbles of a southern man calling me nigger and no good! Yet I see my feet and I can see that crusty crimson blood clings to pale white feet.

Within my bastard face, I can’t ask a supposed saint or Mary, but if I am a son of something, certainly God must be the father. He must be crying from up above. I feel no rain, a bastard I remain; I might as well throw out the Word and pray to Mary. Instead I pray to this willow tree, for it is alive and scars as my hand cuffs scrape bleeding sap. It weeps too, the leaves heave downwards over me, hiding the sun off my back. One slash whips my shoulder, bleached piano key bone glistening. This is not so bad though, I feel fainting soon. But why do they call me nigger? For, look at my skin, it is neither black or white, but fatty pink and bloody red! How can you call me any color then? For ground beef is neither cow nor distinctively one color, its food. Then I am neither human or food, just a pea brained piece of furniture like a plastic chair or cracked mirror; everything it seems, is meant to be broken.

Matthew Phillippe Michaud

Comments (3)

hi me
written by matt michaud on November 02, 2007

this was actually printed on your website..and its by me? whoa weird...

now this is good
written by Donna Allard on November 04, 2007

Matt your poem is a beginning of something you must continue to explore. I can see a book cover...

cheers

CPA President

wowsers!!
written by topher on November 07, 2007

very well written,very,very cool and candid

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