“KM4” Poems & Drawings by Tom Sleigh and Michael Hafftka

There’s a camel a goat a sandal left in red sand.

Over there’s a water tower, under that’s the bore hole

and here the body asks and asks about the role

it’s asked to play: no matter how it’s dressed.

Like a nomad like a journalist like the hyena

who eats even the bones

and shits bone-white scat from the calcium.

No matter if it sleeps under a dome

of UNHCR plastic, baby blue in the sun,

or hides in a spider hole

or walks around in uniform behind plate glass,

the body makes itself known before it becomes unknown.

On the television the blade runner is facing down the skin-job,

and of the two, who is the more human?

On the table there isn’t a glass of whiskey but the ghost of whiskey

that keeps whispering, It’s OK to be this way, nobody will know.

And then the boy who rolls his pant legs

up above his ankles because to let them drag along the ground

is to be unclean turns right before your eyes into a skeleton.