Fever Dreams: A Selection of Poetry

By Robert E. Miss

Fever Dreams bares the soul’s troubling yet magical experiences.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Aug 13, 2014
• ISBN: 9781483534428

Book preview

2014

Ferment

Big Bill Diggs tended bar by the river.

Gentle Bill Diggs, a most obliging nigger.

As Bill shuffled home from Ada’s place, his shoulders drooped.

The molasses smile stuck tacky on his face slowly fermented.

On the dusty road to his doorstoop

Each step now slid and slithered a louder slitter and clink

Of bottlecaps underfoot.

Far bendwards and backwards the road bristled the tiny

points of cork and golden dots.

A whitefrothed ferment, sour bellyful of yessirs and nossirs,

The blistering boil of flouted orders

Burst Bill’s corky mask.

He scooped and dryheaved an alky’s worth of caps

At the alkaline heat.

No caps clinked to the stoneflecked crust of a road.

Only dust settled at Bill’s feet

Where his last downcast dignity lay cast down.

A flock of grackles jump-flew through the maples,

Ebony hecklers with tails switching a tarantella

Clacked their castanet beaks:

Big Bill

Black

Big

Bill

Bill, slave

Slave, Bill

Digs Bill

Bill