When All the Grave Keepers are Gone

A Ballad of Young Paul

“These are the times when madmen are like moths,”
Says Pa, says Pa
“Be safe,” says Ma
She pleads to Paul

Paul smiles and leans
Into his sweetheart’s apple cheeks
“Farewell, my dove,” says Paul

The ships are all boarded up
With children all tucked in
From these hours of darkness
That are expected to roll in

Where the boats won’t row to shore, not tomorrow they’ll go
Paul is lying o’er, o’er the bottomless hole
The one he’s been born to lie in for hours, years and more

But the grave keepers are gone
And so is the crab grass out on the lawns
Where bloody bones stir under dinosaur-slick ground

When the brain dead come out of their coma
The children’s snakes and trees do blossom
And the fruits shake loose
Down the spine and into the watery tear

And in the words of the Good-Good Book
The mongrels and heathens come out for a closer look
And crawling through the sand with piles of it in his boots and his hands
Here comes Paul

Well, it’s been ten years, maybe three more
Since the Reaper came down
With his sickle and alarm
And the boat sinks down
Eaten up to the mast and the oars

Paul jumps down
Out of the boat
The rocks start screaming
“Lord, don’t let him out!”
And he swims and swims and he kicks
Through the rivers and the sticks
Through the shanty houses with broken sinks
And fat women wearing barely anything

Paul recalls, “Be safe,” says Ma
“Your sweethearts got a lot of gall
To still be in love with a scab like you.”
Oh, Paul remembers while he fingers his lips
As he falls asleep under a half moon
Looking up from its reflection in a ditch

Meanwhile, there’s some criminal behavior
From the violin player
Who used to be in a band with a cousin of Paul’s

He’s cheek to cheek
With the girl that’s been in Paul’s dreams
And on the violin goes the chorus
To “Old Dan Tucker”

He kneels in an alley and tells her he loves her
When he spots Paul and a sewer rat prying together
Peeping out from the guts of a drain

Violet cries out, “Thunderstorm!”
And with that, cuts the clouds and pours the rain
So long Sun: melt, dissolve and dissipate directly down to the grains

There’s a small altercation
With the appearance of a pen knife
But unaware of the location
The blood leads to the side
Of the man in the band with a cousin of Paul’s

Violet screams, dripping tears into her cone
Of huckleberry iced cream
And how Paul shakes and shivers
But not a word can he deliver
Upon the body that lies under
The wild dingo dogs’ baited howls

“It was a classic case of self-defense,”
Paul finally positions with Violet
But the only thing she can promise
Is, in fact, to not be quiet
For, in her chagrin, the lesser of two evils had come to expire

“Run away, Paul, you slippery, slimy toad
No more shall we meet and no more shall we cross these roads
May the Devil find you and prick your bones with poison
As the Sweet Lord chuckles and neglects to confine him.”

Twice defeated and doubly heart-ached
Paul simply runs in place
As is the case for the rest of his life
In and out of flop houses
For surviving he’s certainly not the proudest
Since he’s never had a house that’s to be called a home ere go

Paul constructs one last letter
Intent to tell Violet how his heart still swells for her
But a reconciliation Paul knows is not set
He sends the letter away and just as quickly
Ties a fine buckskin belt around his neck

The overturned bucket is kicked

And where Paul is sent—above or deep down—no one knows

But now, after 13 years of no affection
Violet’s been given some unearthly direction
That’s led her back to Paul

Violet unhitches her bags
And climbs down from the wagon
Here at the place of Paul

A redheaded crow roosts on a branch
And rattles the fence
Leading down the cobblestone path to Paul

As Violet knuckles the door
And whistles a tune
She’s shocked to find upon her arrival
Flies buzzing around the head of Paul

She weeps and she wails
And yells down to hell
“Oh, how you made me suffer
For this magnificent malignant!
For now I am too old to find any young lover at all

This sack of dripping flesh and meat
That used to kiss so sweet
Is now just an address for decay.”

And she was quite correct
In the extraction of her display
For the only mourners left were not exactly worms
But instead a blowfly or two
And some maggots that grew out of Paul