Memories of Winnipeg
And Crazy Eight Bar
By Michael Lee Johnson
I’m drunk, isolated,
and horny,
I stumble into The Crazy Eight
Bar and it wasn’t my lucky charmed night.
Flirting with Indian women, delusional
with my white ass superiority,
I’m doing card tricks,
and end up getting my guts
and rib cage kicked out.
I’m circled by Métis Indians
no facial war paint
no Indian war bonnets,
but they fooled me.
I’m down eating floor dirt,
and the kicks keep coming-
thick needle toe boots, cowboy style, fast and heavy.
I crawl to my car half dead barely breathing,
collapsed lungs, head on the steering wheel
I somehow how find the hospital.
Spitting blood and Apple Jack wine,
my tan suite is ruined,
I pissed my white pants yellow-
worst of all I deserved it.
So I learn, when in a strange town
find a place where the color of your face fits,
And don’t cheat at cards.
-2008-
Native I Am, Cocopa
By Michael Lee Johnson
I am mother proud
of the greatest
events that fade before me.
I dig earthworms
and farm dirt
from my fingertips
and grab native
Baja & Southwestern
California
soil & desert sand
wedged between my
spaced teeth.
My numbers or few or is it only me
a useless decay, dentures
lost in desert sand?
I gain no respect.
I once drank a Budweiser beer
out of the keg in
St. Louis, Missouri
just to make sure I was
born on north American soil.
In my heart digs many memories
and 41 relatives left in 1937.
I see praise & prayers
from native Gods.
I am Cocopa of Yuman family
and extent into the mouth
of many Colorado rivers and mountains.
Mist is my memories.
I survive on corn, melons,
pumpkins and mesquite beans-
add a few grass seeds, a hint of red wine,
burial roots of history faded on
parchment.
-2008-
Loved this poem…nice work sir.