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terrible flowering of their madness
There's a sheriff's car parked near Emerald Mound,
and the deputy is looking down at his lap and smiling,
which means he's probably doing what everyone else is doing
these days, that is, texting, though I think he's knitting a quilt
out of the scalps he's taken off travelers like me:
a killer has been working these country roads of late
with a blue flashing light, pulling people over and shooting
them for fun, like the men who lived in caves on the Natchez
Trace in the day and who killed travelers for money and then
because they found out how much they liked killing.
Historian Robert Coates says these men would have been
like others if they'd stayed back east, though once they entered
the wilderness, they opened their own hearts
to the dark heart of the continent, breathed in its perfumed
appeal, beheld the terrible flowering of their madness,
and revealed by their violence how different they were
from other men, and I like this, it makes sense,
but I wonder if those men might not have been okay if they'd just
had girlfriends. It's one big black and white movie
when your baby's not in the picture, that's for sure:
promoter Dick Waterman wakes one morning to the sound
of blues man Robert Pete Williams playing his guitar
and singing softly, and when Waterman says That's
beautiful, you should play that at your shows, Williams
says Oh, no, that's not music, I'm just talking to my Hattie
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