Laramie (Most likely) One of the other kids that lived down at the munitions dump I believe his name was Laramie Would go hunting out in the Soviet scrap metal For smokeable remnants of Russian cigarettes He was always talking about The crux of the argument While I preferred to discuss the argument’s shell The shell was the story of our lives and times The crux was something different That I don’t claim to know anything about Apparently he was a gymnast When the state was his guardian Before this Back in the colorful, functional Most likely it’s true His arms are gigantic and gone all soft And his mattress fragment smells like souring human meat The crux of the argument, he was saying, While we were sifting through the dirt mound Of the dump’s south mouth For flecks of army-rationed pretzels The crux of the argument Was something about the middle class luxury of indecision We came across a hoof in the dirt Some kind of hoof A cloverleaf of pencil lead Attached to no leg This was after the days of stray stones It could only be a hoof That being the shell of the argument It’s how you find your mother in a train station Where every head is shaved It’s the sentinel smell in the air Of coming acid rain It’s the gravity of consciousness Rolling down a hill Laramie was a gymnast His arms are bags of water This is after the after Beyond an argument’s end In the weapon parts and dirt We chewed on the hoof Taking turns in the fog It’s just a recent memory, That’s all - Eric Arnold