OUTCAST

                                        Goodbye to this house and all its memories
                                        We just got too old to say we’re wrong.
                                             – Tom Rush (“Child’s Song”)

I follow your poem
to Google all the Tom Rush songs
my unaccompanied tongue could imitate—
turned gravelly since that 60s feeling
like an LA outcast, like an Indian
forced to die in a bluecoat army.

                    Nothing noble in Dakota,
                    the booms and busts
                    from Deadwood to the Bakken
                    claptrap towns on ground
                    that holds the gold
                    and light sweet crude—
                                        that make a man
                                        just want to run.

I gravitate towards native poetry,
mostly half-breeds now with hybrid-vigor,
steal the epigraph you borrowed
to seal the dreams we had in the bad times,
the loves and lust we clung to knowing
they were too good to last.

                                        after “Corrective Interlude” by Adrian Louis

“Child’s Song”