Rod-Strokes Survival, With A Deadly Hammer (V3) Poem by Michael Lee Johnson

Rod-Strokes Survival, With A Deadly Hammer (V3)



Rod-Strokes Survival, With a Deadly Hammer (V3)
By Michael Lee Johnson

Rebecca fantasizes that life is a lottery ticket or a pull of a lever,
that one of the gambling chips in her pocket is a winner or the slot machines a redeemer,
but life itself is not real that is strictly for the mentally insane at the Elgin Mental Institution.
She gambles her savings away on a riverboat
stuck in mud on a riverbank, the Grand Victoria, in Elgin, Illinois.
Her bare feet are always propped up on wooden chair,
a cigarette droops from her lips like morning fog.
She always dreams of traveling, not nightmares.
But she cannot overcome, overcome
the terrorist ordeal of the German siege of Leningrad.
She is a foreigner now; she is a foreigner for good.
Her first husband died after spending a lifetime in prison
with stinging nettles in his toes and feet; the second
husband died of hunger when there were no more rats
to feed on, after many fights in prison for the last remains.
What does a poet know of suffering?
Rebecca rod strokes survival with a deadly mallet.
She gambles nickels, dimes, quarters, tokens toss away,
living a penniless life for grandchildren who hardly know her name.
Rebecca fantasizes that life is a lottery ticket or the pull of a lever.

-2007-
(R- 2014)

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