Poetry by Micah Fletcher

^{Fuck Principles.}

Loyalty.

Is the worst idea I’ve ever been proud of. Loyalty 

Is chink in every plate of my armor. I’d love to tell you

That’s worth it. 

I just can’t.

Less a choice, or a culture

more a force, like a thunderstorm

Like typhoon, like this sea 

will fucking swallow you

                   little tugboat.

                   So pray often. 

Because dead men tell no tales.

But if you’re anything like me,

And have not let a poor choice stop you yet,

Then pull up a stool.

Have a drink.

Take the pig sticker 

out of your rib cage,

And tell me a story.

---

^{Reality/Television}

Ya know, there are children who can’t laugh

In cities that don’t smile,

Dreaming of color beneath a black-white sky 

In the VHS static of their lives.

And i was taught how to splice tapes together,

Just so I could Wizard-Of-Oz myself into a chromaticast lifestyle.

But when I tried, that’s when I learned that 

                   Formatting

Is the careful art of building borders in an experience,

Just to walk people through its geography,

Call it a story,

And justify all the suffering you go through just to reach the end.

---

^{Abraham Ties Rebar}

This week, I am screaming the hymnal of a square spade and a gravel pile.

Because a man died, and everyone got tired of people like him dying

By people who wear spades on their chest torn from the shafts of gravediggers,

I scrape the ground. Rip the gravel

I am a shoveler of foundations. I move the stability,

Living in the contradictions, anger

Is an excellent fuel supply. ask my body.

see the ripples of slender meat

As they work, watch me, see the wet of my skin, the perspiration of it all,

The glistening image of my exhaustion pushed forward solely by my anger,

Burying 400 years of children in unmarked graves because

We don’t bury your kind on sacred land.

 Our kind is sacred. Not like the sacred

We desecrated, the type we don’t acknowledge.

 But the kind of holy-hallelujah-sacred that bolts your childhood out of its dreams like a spade

Sticking out of 75 yards of gravel,

 a promise, that you too will go below

If you don’t value the right interpretation of some guy named Abraham,

Who i have never met, but i am sure, knew the promise of a shovel,

Of work, tomorrow, and the fact that someone has to move the dirt

If they want to build something stable

---

^{Eight Am in C Minor.}

The only dance i fear

Is the one thousands do every morning.

Eight AM drenches us in a fog 

Of cigarette smoke,

Portland rain , and Tear stained fear game.

The air, tattooed with apologies. 

Fills with sleepy hordes.

They weave in and out of one another

In traffic like fingers between clasped hands

Asking “Please.”

We grip prayers 

between palm-sweated steering wheels.

Trust the sleep of a thousand cocked eyes,

Shoulders dropped under work weight,

All frayed and aching.

We’re all just getting by.

Passing from risk to risk.

Hoping we arrive safely

With punctual timing

To the places we don’t wanna be in.

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