A Face to Meet the Faces: An Anthology of Contemporary Persona Poetry

Ballad of Greg Withrow

157 It Kept on Burning Ballad of Greg Withrow Alison Luterman 1) Love blindsided me. Crept up in those dumb white sneakers they make waitresses wear. This girl said, “You seem like such a nice guy.” And she put eggs in front of me. I ate them, though by then I was such a mess of mud inside I couldn’t hardly speak human. Dirt with a pile of eggs in front of it. Except she smiled or something. So I went back. Went back for her smile and her number. Love crept up on dirt. 2) She was new in town and didn’t know. She never seen the likes of what I was up to. My job: big man on the hate rodeo. Ride into town, get the white kids fired up telling them how the niggers and spics and jews had all the money, all the jobs. Why they weren’t getting any. Under my direction a few black heads might get smashed like pumpkins the day after Hallowe’en, or the body of some gook show up in the tall weeds outside of town with no one but his family to count him missing, and them not even able to tell the cops in proper English. I wanted to be like Hitler, or better, Genghis Khan. 158 A Face to Meet the Faces 3) She didn’t have family neither. And my old man used to like to kick me downstairs from when I could walk, until one night he kicked me out entirely. On the streets the Nazis was family, they took me in. Because I was Aryan, white like them. And we was someday going to rule again. 4) What happened before doesn’t matter. What happened after I take as payment on debts past due. But I’ll tell you something: Love opens you up worse than a knife. I’ve been stomped on with steel boots, punched in the stomach, had my head swung into a wall, into a toilet. Love is worse. There’s nothing to hold onto. 5) See, we was family to each other. She had no idea, she didn’t know. Little by little love was ruining me. How could I eat her eggs and go out afterward and preach kill the nigger? Kill? I’d lift my head and it was another man, a black man, eating his eggs with maybe someone who loved him waiting at home in their bed for him to make her warm. And I couldn’t do it. Love was ruining me. 159 It Kept on Burning 6) I tried to get away quiet. Out by the back door. But hate— Hate really does not want to let you go. It thinks it owns you. And I owed something, now. Would have to pay. Still, when they came for me I was not ready. Came with their baseball bats and smashed my jaw so I couldn’t talk to no more reporters, and say that Hate thing was a mistake. After, I wouldn’t tell police who done it. Hell, it was me who done it. I trained me to come after me in the middle of the night and leave me in a pool of my own blood. That’s who done it. 7) When I turned on her she left and I don’t blame her. I’d have drove her to the station myself, if I knew what come next. After the news that night when I kept on telling the wrong I done and that I was sorry. They got me good— nailed me to a six-foot piece of wood like the savior of hell, and I come stumbling down the streets of Sacramento, the nails in my hands, and blood running down my side. And the white folks passed me by. Like this I know God has a plan. And nothing happens that He don’t see. 8) Cause my own Aryan nation had warned me: I was as good as dead already. And the others, they were afraid I think. My own people. And then the black couple come. 160 A Face to Meet the Faces And the man says, “Is this who I think—?” And the woman says, “We got to take him down” And the man says, “Hell we got to, do you know who this is?” And she says, “’Course...