The Trees Look Like Crucified Thieves*

*Title taken from a Warren Zevon song; this poem is dedicated to everybody

Was speaking to a friend I’d barely seen last year
He had come back from the old war

I asked him about Tuesday’s mess on Wall Street
A battalion of people were laughing downstairs like nothing’s happened
Nothing in the world at all
He told me he had heard news but couldn’t say anything otherwise
His silence was a knife in my thigh like in Shakespeare’s Caesar
But I didn’t know what all the violence was for this time
If for anything at all, ever

Secrets on the move: trampling over rose bushes and public parks at night,
All over the county, through the whole entire bloodless night, hour by hour—end to end
A period of transfused hours and broken bottles and cut-up holes and twisted needles
They will never again have the chance to feed hungry cells
Telephone booths out of the past, littered with signs of sad people and lonely people
Broke friends and tired enemies fill up my head again—everybody’s frothing at the mouth for
their own personal, private reasons
Smoke fills the little room we’re all crying in

I asked my friend about all those salty margaritas out there by the coast, out there out west
I asked him if the dream was still true, if it was still worth pursuing—if any dream was worth
going after now that home was on fire and I was miles away like an involuntary coward and exile
He said he was too angelically depressed to go out and drink again
In any case, he felt totally alone and cut-off and severed—tried & false & dying, too

•

The taste of wet sand in my mouth & his
There was no point at pretending to be social

I stepped out of the house to talk some sense into the world that night
Shelling bled me out like last week’s cold, seamless music
There are no fire-tigers out here past the forest line
There’s no angel-to-angel meeting or cherubic parade over the fountain waters besides
Stephanie’s castle
I’m walking behind the old southern gallows: people who fought tooth and nail against the
proposed sanctity of violence, set up on a million crosses for the birds and everybody else
But I was wrong: the dark made the hanging rope and martyrs up out of presumption & coarse
nightmare & distant yelling

It was just the sycamores

Alex Russell is a journalist with background in visual art and poetry. Originally from Ukraine, he's lived in America for 15+ years. Warren Zevon, Lou Reed, Harvey Milk, Patti Smith, and Laurie Anderson are some of his heroes. His on-going love affair with freeform verse is Allen Ginsberg’s fault. In writing as in life, empathy is everything.