I like that the antidote for chaos might be more chaos
like I like the story of the confidence man who makes
a considerable fortune writing ante-mortem obituaries
and can boast P. T. Barnum among his clientele;
or how the story of my two grandfathers goes: one
a builder, employed to build a house to be haunted
by the widow whose husband conceived and developed
the modern repeating rifle; the other a moustachioed
and severe small-town Sheriff, a sweat or light rain
beading his forehead. They say a man enters town,
holds up this small gas station, makes off with nothing
more than pocket change, walking-around money,
having shot the red-headed teenage attendant, and
disappears. Blue lights coming on. Blue distant hills.
___________
Dane Holt’s poems have appeared in Poetry Ireland Review, The Trumpet, The White Review, Stand, and elsewhere. He is Poetry Editor of The Tangerine, a magazine of new writing in Belfast.