Smoking Rope Burns

Rope rather than guns

I said to the man

-in America anyway-

As if he asked for some alibi,

as if anyone Wanted me: Dead or Alive.

Not that

I suggested murder or hinted at a

lynch mob-no soldier trained for Tug of wars.

I have no skin in that game.

Here is the Reader

with their eyes on the trigger

pulling out meaning,

hanging there, in town squares,

the tangled mass pulls at twisted truths

by yarns and feet, knots and nots.

Suicide is never the last act.

Remember?

A rope also saves lives, he said

depending upon the need,

in his all-

American way.

Painting By Albert Baerston, Belgian painter, Ghent 1866 - Gent, 1922 [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.