3605. THE BRUNT OF MADAGASCAR

THE BRUNT OF 

MADAGASCAR

(1979)

Oh, I'll find something  -  that speeding car,

off-register, and spinning across the landscape,

neither stopping nor dawdling anywhere. The

high windows on the stuccoed apartment house

where the Kerbuniac Sisters kept their time.

It was little in Winter, mostly in Spring, and

then my penniless six months were over.

I returned to something much different  -  the

rifle-butt to the chest, that machine gun gunner's

coy eye as he scanned above the crowd he was

so brazenly shooting into. They told me, in that car,

could have been two fleeing agents; what or where,

I was never told. Some Soviet malarkey, back then

it could have been, or another typical anti-American

screed: people in bad-off Africa screaming about

time and gold and weapons and caches of lost

money. I never knew about any of it. I stayed

in place hoping to stay alive. Pretty simple

stuff; like big flies in my morning soup, or

something runny and yellow over my

evening's goat-meat meal plate.