How to Be Eaten by a Lion. Michael Johnson

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How to Be Eaten by a Lion - Michael  Johnson

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      They later called it nyoka—serpent—

      a mamba no one had seen the equal of.

      They skewered it with rebar and watched it writhe.

      They began with delicious nonchalance,

      laying bets on who would deliver the coup de grâce.

      With slingshots and bearing balls

      the boys inched up the tail break by bruise,

      aiming short to spark and shrapnel in the gravel.

      They loved quartz smoke like some vital ingredient

      in the bread of vengeance.

      Elders squatted, whittling blowgun arrows,

      imploring everyone to not hasten this gift,

      not cheat them of their rightful portion.

      That is how he found them, the pastor.

      He glared about, daring anyone

      to question his compassion,

      as he gripped the rebar, a piece he knew stolen,

      and angered more, unplanted it

      and bent as if to pick up the limp body

      when it struck. Men beat it to pieces.

      His hand burned, he said. He sank to his knees

      while they ran for the campus nurse.

      That was how he died, with his snake,

      a creature who spoke the only language it knew.

      In Praise of the Village Idiot

      Torrents of sun from mica on the hedges,

      the quartz driveways framed in avocados.

      Babuleo and his anklebells long overdue.

      Rumour has him in a new shirt, a jungle green.

      Rumour has him radiant.

      It will not last, for he’s not what we want him to be.

      He spies through windows, eats our garbage,

      his testes dangling from torn shorts.

      Someone’s sure to get him new ones

      because they can’t handle his immodesty,

      his seeming carelessness.

      They don’t realize he knows no other way.

      He sucks clay because it tastes good,

      a saltiness he’s found nothing better than.

      And his garbage meals shuck their ferment

      to his delight—all tasting like gifts.

      His anklebells sound his coming

      and kids badger him where he goes.

      He seethes and curses them,

      their elusive ridicule, their cruel normality.

      His gibberish is a longing, a palpable desire.

      That he could speak such words,

      find the right invective, some sweet slang.

      Desire that he could just talk.

      Then there are days—today perhaps—

      when he finds a voice and sings,

      a hollow rasping where his face speaks beauty,

      blissful repose—a truce.

      He makes fluent sense, a soulful parlance,

      like Beethoven to his own deaf ear,

      as though he’s always spoken perfectly,

      never said anything else, as though he, even now,

      was just wondering: Did I make music today?

      The Volcanologist’s Lament

      Living things know the sound of their hour.

      The stormchaser knows the wind calling,

      the eye’s silence before the hammerfall.

      For the hellfighter, the sudden company

      of fire, oil turned to tongues that lick the dust

      with flame. For rockhounds the earth’s

      seismic bitchings, stones tumbling from Earth’s

      molten bruise. In all our hours

      can one find more haunting a thrall than the dust

      and shockwall closing over those calling

      for help? Such images inevitably accompany

      us into the grave: the fall

      of lavasilk, magma’s chaotic freefall

      through the sky’s strata to reclaim the earth.

      A nightly pillar of fire to accompany

      us, a pillar of cloud by day—what ashen hour

      could pass without some stony lord calling

      gravely from the depths? This sweet dust.

      They say we are raised from dust.

      The honey-heft of all the fruit fallen

      in the orchards, the soil calling

      commands of ferment and rot, the earth

      reclaiming all. Everything is the hour

      of his supper. We are his company,

      his very wine and bread. We are a company

      of fools for mistaking the holiness of dust.

      Land, property, certainly. Not an hour

      of these passes unbartered in the rise and fall

      of markets and monies, but the earth

      goes unheard. That lithic heart calling

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