WITNESS PROTECTION PROGRAM

Food is the gun that plows the poor.
A fly on that boy’s eye makes you sick.
Today’s soy price firms a lovely hedge.

Deer can’t swim in rising dam depths.
If you smash the head of a sheepdog
like a cantaloupe on a cable show,

the spray will stain your undershorts
at home through leaky copper coil.
Baby Bells snort with profits, mines reek.

When that man clobbered that woman,
when that car kissed that girl’s face,
when those planes sprayed smart samples

into the sad camouflaged laps
of this month’s weak sister, leaving
freeze-dried death masks, you changed

the channel. When body parts are tweaked
with pliers, redwoods drag behind claws,
or a dim student rapes his teacher

stars implode like anoxeric girls
who jump off the bridge of their desires
from heights the water slaps like sharks.

What father did to mother, or German
shepherd to the meaty leg of whitewashed
Negro, remains outside your jurisdiction.

I see a man in the park flying a kite—
making it spin like singing, slicing
the sky into pieces—from his wheelchair.