Love Hope And Mercy
Those words
have somehow disappeared
from my dictionary.
I don’t know exactly
when it happened,
I remember noticing them
fading a bit
when searching for such things as
the definition of luminaria
horse opera
or meritocracy,
their black
slowly morphing into gray,
then eventually to
white,
an empty space
where I thought something
important
used to be,
like a person, suddenly dead.
I remember thinking
it could only be defective ink,
not an Orwellian excision
authorized by some invisible
Ministry of Truth,
vanished,
a void
to be filled with whatever you
would replace it with
instead.
And as, slowly, emphatically,
unequivocally,
the shit is beaten out of us,
so is the love,
while these days drag on and on
like the cops dredging a lake
for a body
that is probably mine,
and it’s mid-December again,
many of us stuck, as always,
between a Santa and a Jesus
place—
it was easier
when we were children,
then we could believe in both,
but that doesn’t do us
one damned bit of good
now.
Scott Blackwell is a former resident of San Francisco and an MFA graduate of the San Francisco Art Institute. He is a Pushcart Prize nominee and has most recently had poetry published in Negative Suck, Ascent Aspirations, The Stray Branch, The Interpreter’s House, Main Street Rag, Floyd County Moonshine, Nerve Cowboy and Tribeca Poetry Review.
He currently resides in Champaign, Illinois.