There’s a sugary gentility in Dixie.
It’s a lie buttered over to protect
the Great Lie.

“Colonel, sir!
you’ve lost your war.
Get on with your peace.
Or get you gone.”

But the battle-scared Mississippi colonel
chose, instead, to sacrifice
another and another generation
to the illusion he clutched
tight to his soul as his Truth.

(bless his heart.)

Most of the world has since marched on by.
Some have settled in neighboring places,
building new plantations,
speaking in new accents,
creaming their skin to shield against
the southern sun.

They stand like tomb stones
on the colonels throat
as he chokes out his unrequited love
of a past that never was.
These newly settled ones can’t
or worse,
won’t
understand him.
For the only sound he makes
is a parched attempt at a Yell,
but sounding for all the world
like the stale, smelly croak
of an old man dying,
quilt-covered,
up to his bald pate,
rocking in his favorite rocker
on a veranda buried by wisteria.

And again they said,

“Cut the cord, sir!
Be done with it.
Your cause is lost in the
myth-mist of a groggy-sleep-dream.
It’s an old candle from Camelot
sputtering its last flame-spit-spark
from a tarnished candelabra,
crystals dull, stained,
mouldering on their rusting hooks,
some shattered pieces strewn on Tara’s
old rotting-ball-room-floor
where echoes of a Tennessee waltz
fade into the walls.

“…old times there
ought be forgotten!
Get away!
Get Away!
Get you away
from ol’ Dixie Land!”