I unraveled in clumsy film
across his bony shoulders,
and scribbled notes on the
embossed lettering that
echoed in vertical alignment
with the rows of gun-backed soldiers,
bloodshot eyes,
across the cool grounds,
streaming red – this is the genesis
of my revolution – leather boots sunken
in skin deep rivers of flesh;
they cry with the bronze tip
of a 35 mm bullet shoveled in
gaping mouths, I cry in 35 mm of
transparent rolls in black boxes
waiting for clicks in shutters that
ignite barrels of guns and trigger cannons
until fog becomes the arm that fired too early
or the crimson crater in his trousers when he
was the barrack that saved your mother from
crying and your father from jumping
and he cries with us all in the reflection
of his cracked spectacle: give me
my damn Lafayette, write me in all
your anthems and sing me from the
stony hilltops of your red rivers until
I can rest on a haze of lead and gray powder.

I am a glass horse
that breaks too easily
and shatters in shards,
you are armory, metal memory
and the ironic tasting blood
of a red Constitution.