Devonte Travels the Sorry Route

True, like I scribe to you
Devonte was a foot soldier.
Hep to the old one two
brogan banged pavement.
 

Downbeat long past
“feets do yo stuff.”
He was the dis
mordant shuffler,
son of the penny-ante,
off-beat “love will find a way” Blakean prodigy.
 

                                                                               Glider of man
                                                                               holes and jack-ball
                                                                               bottles pushed to the curb.

He was the hoofer,
the wolf boy calling cadence
to Okmulgee back
dreams and dawning days
where he Eagle Rocked
in Cimarron sludge
and ragged tails                                                       at a high school dance

After hours
                    Devonte pushed a rickety shopping cart
                                                                  through market lanes and stone soul picnic
surrey with the frontier fringe on top.
emblematic of the colonizer’s booze
grandiloquent booby prize filth
                                                                  progeny of branch noose ripe tree

Legacy of a miraculous
bounty of hang nailed fingers
blood birds poaching pedigrees to
“Here I am. Now you see me, now you don’t.”
subject to the gaze of distant blue hated brothers
or rather a bother of continual apparition

the “me not me” rattling in the stove pipe
of his own voice rife with suffering.