Buddy Wakefield – ‘Farmly’
By Button Poetry
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“A Choir of Honest Killers” by Buddy Wakefield is now available from Write Bloody Publishing.
Transcript provided by YouTube:
00:04
[Music]
00:08
once when we were way back when we took
00:15
our only family photo and olan meals in
00:17
the side of a Sears Roebuck there were
00:21
11 of us we were shaped like breakfast
00:28
biscuits mostly American biscuits don’t
00:35
call me a scrambled egg if you want to
00:37
keep you too
00:41
that day we were each allowed one bad
00:45
choice from the bargain rack some are
00:48
closed that lasted a single where before
00:50
we stained them green with grass and the
00:52
knees hand scraped from breaking falls
00:55
breaking falls because always falling
00:58
being dirty was never in question being
01:02
poor was a rumor we believed in all the
01:07
ants all the cousins all those cheeks
01:10
no one’s father turned up and it turned
01:12
out to be a pretty good picture for loud
01:15
people who only talked that way to
01:17
distract you from the stains they are
01:19
wearing worn out I got it backwards and
01:22
made a career directly addressing stains
01:25
I have enjoyed my job mostly gets
01:29
clean I mean look how happy I am now get
01:35
me out of this goddamn body
01:40
when we tried to leave sears roebuck and
01:43
Trudy was stopped in questioned for
01:45
shoplifting a pair of jeans that day she
01:49
didn’t do it all parties involved were
01:54
very surprised it was the same day my
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cousin Justin slammed his finger in the
01:59
car door and broke it he screamed so
02:02
loud I dreamed about cough syrup he was
02:05
unwilling to love us again until we
02:07
could get him proper help we haven’t
02:10
seen Justin in years before that we were
02:15
playing freeze tag around bossy drunk
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folks at a family reunion were the
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unhealthiest among us were given the
02:21
most respect I suspect by that point I
02:24
had already surrendered to shock
02:26
treatment the kind passed down from one
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unfortunate belief to another did a
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thing about believing in what you were
02:33
told to believe in is that you were told
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to believe it I was 9 today I am 39
02:39
trying to figure out how to write this
02:41
letter to a family of survivors and
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praise them cleanly we are still growing
02:46
out of these clothes we chose every
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Sunday dressed like faded blue Christmas
02:51
trees in an attempt to oblige the
02:52
unwritten dress code of rigid white
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Baptists who do not clap for the singer
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when the singer finishes feeling him
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with her voice out loud lily-white
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whipped and fresh off a farm we never
03:02
owned until it Tina and Uncle Bobby
03:05
bought cows once
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[Music]
03:11
when we were way back when before Morgan
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was born before Jess or David and Tommy
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our sweet little 350 pound paranoid
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schizophrenic overlord
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Mima Verne lily and Laverne Montgomery
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my grandmother was at the Rusk State
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mental house subject two years of shock
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treatments the kind passed down from
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mouth gags made out of thick cotton
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batting and snake oil to scrambled egg
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after scrambled egg after scrambled egg
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back before that was widely accepted as
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a really bad idea her holy Texas
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Chainsaw her leather her heart her love
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was afraid to tremble but it did y’all
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she shook the room when she walked and
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spoken great grief catastrophes the
03:57
government lived in her ceiling vents
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crazy is an easy word to say the devil
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is an easy name to speak darkness is a
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super artsy concept I will enter through
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the mouth with a splintered flag Poland
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but your ancestors if you ever come
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near my cousin’s doctor
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[Music]
04:22
on Sundays Laverne would roll all seven
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grandchildren into a dust cloud and walk
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us from her house in Kilgore Texas for
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ten minutes all the way over to the
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church next door
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we were always late we were always fever
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in light exhaustion was never in
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question on Sundays each week she would
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anchor the end of a Pew unravel a roll
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of lifesavers and passed them down to
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spare each of us 30 seconds of brother
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John’s boredom suck a mint fresh in our
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death while she ate a banana and smacked
05:02
it like through his good oatmeal stuck
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to the sides of her tongue back when God
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was still a bad father before the Lord
05:09
finished clearing his throat of the Dark
05:10
Ages when I didn’t know the color of my
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skin was such a murderer before I
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realized how deeply my people heard the
05:17
earth using words that rhymed with
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trigger and deeds that rhymed with a
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bang mother loved her gospel
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privilege is an unpayable debt you owe
05:26
me nothing I didn’t even see it coming
05:29
I’ve never even saw it coming when my
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cousin Lacey passed me the hymnal book
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laughed under her breath and pointed to
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a song called
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I’m going home
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I laughed so hard I got fat and ate
05:43
drugs for 25 years
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too terrified to wake up because what if
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the gay gets worse joy can be so
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insulting
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it was everyone’s equal fault Damon in
05:53
case no one ever told you you should
05:56
have never been yelled at in the first
05:57
place you were an angel so perfect
06:00
I put the word angel in my poem and that
06:03
is real uncomfortable for me boy
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we do not need the South to understand
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us we need the South to understand
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itself animals even the filthy ones they
06:13
only say what they need to I am talking
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to tell you to stop family fasten your
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breath to your bodies and watch if we
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accept these bodies this will all be
06:22
over it’s never not been a good heart to
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deliver us from the overworked language
06:28
and our poor excuses having lived a
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shitty life does not mean you’ve seen it
06:32
all you’ve seen a ton of eNOS look
06:34
alive cousins prove nothing and call it
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grace let’s all spread out and search
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this place for the best ways out of
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Houston without carrying each other’s
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anger good God
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when I try to remember what came before
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us before this life I sometimes get
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caught up and how nervous my family was
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to finally get to be with each other in
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this world effective coping skills they
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weren’t affordable when we were kids and
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nobody ever got any for their birthday
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but we do have a picture of a people
07:01
trying so hard
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smiling loudly shaped like breakfast
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scrambled eggs
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mostly once when we were way back with
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after Lynne picked his own switch after
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Laney moved out before J went into
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Corrections
07:28
Laverne left this world rise and shine
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[Music]
07:41
[Music]
08:01
[Music]
08:11
[Music]
08:39
you
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[Music]
08:53
you
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Photo credit: Screenshot from video
The post Buddy Wakefield – ‘Farmly’ appeared first on The Good Men Project.