I love you more in Meth Free Tennessee
as the night fell rough on the loping hills,
rough as the hands of a mother
who is always stuck with the dishes.
Her name, I recall, was Rose
and the look in her eyes said I’m tired,
of the kids, and the heat, and the rain
They had too much
of all of those
in Meth Free Tennessee,
in Knoxville on Green Street
where most of the houses were blighted.
If sorrow was sheetrock,
this town would look like Rome,
but instead the houses slumped
like hopeless gargoyles drunk
in the afternoon humidity.
Sorrow is a lonely servant
this I know that every mother knows,
but Rose is a different story, Rose
was thrown from the top of the stairs
by the boy
she didn’t raise to be one of the monsters.
She couldn’t afford to pay
the bail money or the treatment fees
only the pain of the pews on her knees
each Sunday as she pleaded with God.
Nothing had been free in Meth Free Tennessee,
Not for the past ten years,
not the call collect she got
each second Thursday of the month,
and certainly not when the time came,
as all the neighbors said it would,
the funeral bills.
