tailed by swirling buzzards I descended
under a sky of cooling steel the geese
guarding the river eyed me like bitter colonels

as I passed the dam and turned downtown
I didn’t stop at Doc’s for a beer or sit
in the bus shelter with the teenage lovers

I was finally old enough to press on
when there was business to be done I came
to the concrete courthouse sitting on its concrete

stilts like a ponderous bug a Trojan beetle
aliens might use to breach the city
and spread my arms as an officer

blessed me with her wand and rose
in an elevator with a man with a barbed wire
tattoo around his neck and a woman in heels

as long as justice’s sword oh how sweet
to be unemployable at the yellow counter
I wrote my name three times to make us free