No Cool Hand Luke




I mean it.

They don’t get me back alive

My ankles are raw from the hackles and I’m nearly deaf from the chains ringing in my ears all the time.

I ain’t no Cool Hank Luke.

I didn’t get into this scrape for cutting off no parking meter heads.

I killed somebody and got caught.

I ain’t the first time I killed nobody either. But what the law don’t know what hurt me, and that’s why they put me on a chain gang instead of the gallows.

Some folks said I got off lucky by not getting hanged.

Even the judge seemed to think he’d done me a favor.

Some favor.

Niggers on the outside have it better than I do.

No one beats them up unless they do or say something uppity.

Me, the screws figure I ought to get beaten for getting away with murder like I did.

As if 20 years hard labor isn’t punishment enough.

Sometimes I think I got a raw deal all the way around.

I didn’t plan to kill nobody.

Even those other times when I didn’t get caught.

I just got into a situation with no other way out.

This time it was in a bar where a mean son of a bitch said he didn’t like the way I looked at his scag of a girlfriend.

I never looked at her except once to see what a scag she was.

I tried to keep my nose in my drink.

That son of a bitch dragged it out.

So I stabbed him.

And in front of some many witnesses I didn’t stand a chance in court.

As I said the judge took pity on me and sent me to the chain gang where road masters beat on me to keep me in line.

Sometimes they even wake me up in the middle of the night to punish me for something they say I said in my sleep.

They beat on me like the man I killed was their kin

That’s why I’m out here now, why I got to kill you and take your car.

I don’t have anything against you personal, Mister.

I just can’t have you telling the screws which I way I’ve gone.

I’m no Cool Hank Luke.

I’m never going back, least ways, not alive.

So get out of the car and give me the keys

And tell your wife and kids to get out, too.

 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Crystal clear

Image
    I clean the windows once a week, squeaky clean so I can see the whole street, as there is no glass at all, and I see every detail of every tree and house the smudges blind me to sometimes. I have no acute fascination with what goes out there or in the houses of my neighbors; I just don’t like not knowing things, half the reason I troll news websites knowing I won’t like or agree what I get yet determined to know what it is I disagree with. My neighbors think I’m nosy because they see me when I see them, and they snarl at me when I come out to collect the newspaper from my doorstep, saying untrue things perhaps to get me angry. I mostly don’t talk with them when I don’t have to, and I listen to them only when they complain about my dog being off his leach and leaving not-so-friendly calling cards on their manicured lawns. Sometimes I see too much, the domestic disputes through their unguarded windows, shades down as husband-and-wife shout things I cannot hear, kno...
Read more

Oh what a strange trip it’s been

Image
  They’re all gone. The people and the visions. Though the living room looks like Kansas after Dorothy left it. Food strewn across the carpet, revealed in the orange wedge of sunlight as I throw open the porch curtain to let in fresh air. The place smells of pot and hormones -- ashtrays overflowing with the endless parade of more ordinary cigarettes. Butts even float in the bottoms of almost empty wine bottles. I smell him, the stranger who stalked my girlfriend all night, giving us both hits of LSD as if the each tiny tablet was key for his getting between her legs. His heavy cologne stains me with the outraged I was too stoned to stop. She slumbers in the other room alone as I stand naked, bathed in sunlight. I am changed. A chemical reaction running me in a way I can’t describe, as if I was the rape victim, as if my virgin thoughts have been violated by the light show and the hallucinations, s if I am some new person craving to get back to what I once was. I’m too scared to wake...
Read more

Am I in hell?

Image
The wind blows across the Texas Panhandle like sandpaper across my face, a harsh sun making this dip south feel like a trip through hell. I think of LA and how much I miss its dismal streets and how I ache to get back to a place where rain takes a whole season to wash the world away, rather than this place which dumps it all on you at once after months of slow scalding torture. I keep thinking I’m already dead, despite the doctors’ claims – they asking me again and again if I’ve ever used a dirty needle or made love to another man. They make assumptions about me because my driver’s license says I live in LA. They ask me for a list of lovers, then shake their heads when I give them one, trying hard to make out the boy’s names from the girl’s, and wondering how on earth they will manage to contact them all, eyeing me as if they suspected me of deliberately spreading a plague. The car radio naturally stopped working in St. Louis. So I feel again in the glove compartment for the box of bat...
Read more