-Frederic the Enforcer-

From a mill-town poet's perspective

Let’s travel to the ends of the earth;

pedal fast, west on Bedford to Quarry and points south,

cross Pleasant into the Flint section of town, cross Brayton Avenue,

rolling ever southward, navigating the dead Providence to New York

rails overgrown with meadow-grass to where the gravel road

stops our bikes in their tracks, where the granite walls
of textile mills sit heavy-footed in an unfamiliar landscape.

We don't recognize such stone.

We have no place of our own in the deep southern territories.

Fatso Freddy "Butch" Dagata wants to beat-up

the kid who raised his frantic little hand in class,

telling Miss Pollard that “Frederic did it”.

The little shit disappeared before the 3:30 bell,

now the kid’s going to get a beating

and we pedaled southward to sign-on as witnesses.

Freddy was heavy-set and his head was flat in the back,

without any sign of an anatomical curvature of the skull

as it sliced straight down like a mid-meal holiday ham,

plumbed to the back of his neck. I often wondered if he knew.

We found the kid with his mother

sitting on the porch stairs to his house.

It looked like my house;

three tenement, weather-beaten shingles,

always appearing to be waiting for something else.

From the outside I could hear the inside;

the openings and closings, the shouting and the music.

It sounded like the pulsating beat of my house during an ordinary day.

Sitting on the stairs, the kid's mother looked like my mother.

The kitchen apron wrapped around her housedress, and leather-

flats graced her feet.

Her jeweled eyeglasses had the same kind of wings,

and when she saw us straddling our bikes she rose with the force

and strength of her own granite-quarried neighborhood,—

stone-firm in the face of Freddy’s line-of-fire.

This is the place where the same kind of mothers lived;

her kid above the others of his kind.

If there's a beating to be had, she'll be the one to dish it out,

not fatso Freddy Dagada. 

Her son was weak and she knew it.

She was not weak.

“Boys! Why are you here?—

And you, tough guy. Why is the back

of your head so flat?— 

Turn those bikes around, and go home.”

And so we did.