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A Brief Origin
A bent echo of the end,
an intrusion of The Real,
a catastrophic tornado came through The Loop
breaking apart my morose structure
and tearing down buildings and trees
and leaving us
without power.
So we pretended to be human beings.
Some were the undead, some were charitable.
I sat behind Parkview Place
calmly reading Michael Connelly
and handing out smokes as required.
Dane almost lost it
when he misplaced his glasses
somewhere in the rubble.
But I was strengthened later
on my way to the writers group
at the Independence Center
when I looked and saw
people were already repairing
the garden at Boyle and Laclede
with shovels and hoes,
wheelbarrows full of fancy dirt.
May we come together at the end.
And when you listen
(even when you’re in a book)
you can tell how a story might develop,
even a magically remarkable one
about someone conquering death,
and you can see how if it were written down
it could grow into untold proportions.
And then you can imagine
the brute power
of a public execution.
And then you can understand
that you’ve gone back to the beginning.
- Matthew Freeman
Matthew Freeman’s newest book, Dopamine and the Devil, will soon be released by Coffeetown Press. He holds an MFA from the University of Missouri-St Louis.