[Rick Mullin]

Tattoo Man
In Memoriam

Gone the days of Polaroid April sunshine,
sacrosanct Memorial Day encounters;
Pinewood Derbies, Rotary potluck dinners,
dollar sign notebooks.

Now the taste of something unlike tomorrow.
Now a rage subliminal to the suburbs.
Promise made, an endless excuse delivered.
Enter a stranger

marked for life, thrown out of the Caldwell Diner,
pinched at Jack’s while squeezing the pomegranate.
Bounced from bars, a put-upon Queequeg doling
infinite cowboy.

“Holy Mack’rel, even the face, Paulina!”
Holy arms, a coloratura ocean.
Here be dragons. There a peculiar shade of
prodigal lodger.

You’ll recall. You called the police, remember?
Shielded children, shocked when you saw him coming?
Now your white Republican enclave shimmers.
Down in the summer

news comes slow: A lull in the Captain’s Tower.
Valerie and Vivian stack the tray for
tickets to the Teenage Patrolman’s Breakfast.
Aren’t we happy.

____
S6L2 stack was trick

New S4 added


S4L3 dragons was monsters


Initial epigraph named the man

.