Bullet Points.

Below is a poem by the marvelous Whiting Prize-winning Jericho Brown. It passed across my radar screen recently and I was really wowed by it. I have seen it with the title “Bullets” and also with the title “Bullet Points”, either way, it is apparently in his collection The New Testament.

I will not shoot myself

In the head, and I will not shoot myself

In the back, and I will not hang myself

With a trashbag, and if I do

I promise you, I will not do it

In a police car while handcuffed

Or in the jail cell of a town

I only know the name of

Because I have to drive through it

To get home. Yes, I may be at risk,

But I promise you, I trust the maggots

And the ants and the roaches

Who live beneath the floorboards

Of my house to do what they must

To any carcass more than I trust

An officer of the law of the land

To shut my eyes like a man

Of God might, or to cover me with a sheet

So clean my mother could have used it

To tuck me in. When I kill me, I will kill me

The same way most Americans do,

I promise you: cigarette smoke

Or a piece of meat on which I choke

Or so broke I freeze

In one of these winters we keep

Calling worst. I promise that if you hear

Of me dead anywhere near

A cop, then that cop killed me. He took

Me from us and left my body, which is,

No matter what we’ve been taught,

Greater than the settlement a city can

pay to a mother to stop crying, and more

Beautiful than the brand new shiny bullet

Fished from the folds of my brain  

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