Poetry and Prose from the Center for Writers
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Passim
by CHRISTOPHER BRUNT
Johnny Cash said he wore all black for the poor, the imprisoned, and the conscripted, but I know better. When Cash got sober he put on a blue jean jacket and a crisp white shirt, sang Hallelujah. The poor were still poor, the prisons were full, and how many rich boys went to war?
When I was a young man, I changed clothes twice a day. In the morning I put on my rubber rain coat zipped above the chin. And in the evening I’d change into my beggar’s raiments and return to the people I had seen that day to rob them a second time.
When Johnny Cash died we drank for three straight days. When we couldn’t pay our tab, we zipped the barkeep up in my raincoat and tied him to the juke. Somebody threw in their last five bucks and played “Sunday Morning Coming Down” a dozen times as we left. I drank for another seven years.
I got rich and I got poor. I robbed more men in prison than I ever did free. I was reborn eight times and killed myself eight more. I never found the Lord our God. But I did find peace.
Tonight I sip black coffee and stitch together a coat of many colors, watching rain drops slide down a window like competing versions of time, one drop running past the others, back to the morning Cash died and I wept through the booze, because of the booze, because inside I felt nothing, the black fire of my heart ribboning on like the banner for a regiment of ghosts.
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