A Letter to Kendrick

I got another memorial on my last posting of the murder victims of 2008, which reminds me (again) that I did not post a list for 2009. I will get to that shortly.

I went and saw a reading by the excellent young poet Sandra Beasley from Washington, D.C. last night and it reminded me of my own time in that city in the very early 1990s, a time when something in society just cracked and we entered the world of Clockwork Orange. I remember talking to my wife about a trip to Ireland. She was afraid to go to Belfast, and I had to remind her she was in much greater danger in Washington, D.C. going to the corner for cigarettes that she would be standing in the most dangerously partisan pub in Belfast.

And now I live in another routine contender for Murder Capital of the U.S.A.

I really need to get that list up.

I spent some of my time around and right after the holidays working on a vaguely related project that I thought answered the call that lead me to post the lists for 2008 and 2007. I think now I need to go get a cleaned up list posted and call for memorials again, but until then, here’s a tiny excerpt of what I spent early January working on in lieu of the list, a small piece of something tentatively titled Murder Ballads:

II. Dinneral

A man ought be able
to pick up his kid in
5 o’clock broad daylight
without some fool
drawing a nine
or a .40
in stupid fury,

people scattering on the street
slugs shattering the windshield
blood spattering the seats

A boy ought not
have to watch
his father bleed out
in a shattered car
on Broad Street
at five o’clock
in the afternoon.

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